Long-term monitoring of small-sized birds using a miniaturized bluetooth-low-energy sensor node

This paper presents the design and development of an ultra-low power miniaturized and lightweight wireless sensor node. The node is designed to be worn with minimal effort by small-sized birds to collect, process, and send/receive data to/from a remote host via Bluetooth Low-Energy. The main feature of the developed node is the capability to stream continuously compressed or uncompressed audio and temperature data. The nodes can monitor several birds simultaneously and produce high-quality audio streams, one for each bird, with low audio interference. Due to the combination of low-power hardware and software techniques and technologies, the node achieves a lifetime of up to 24h hours with a single zinc-air battery.