In-Situ Fish Heart-Rate Estimation and Feeding Event Detection Using an Implantable Biologger

Yiran Shen, Reza Arablouei, Frank de Hoog, Hao Xing, Jacques Malan, James Sharp, Sara Shouri, Timothy D. Clark, Carine Lefevre, Frederieke Kroon, Andrea Severati, Brano Kusy

Abstract: Monitoring of physiology and behavior of marine animals living undisturbed in their natural habitats can provide valuable information about their well-being and response to environmental stressors. We focus on detecting the feeding behavior in predatory fish using implantable biologgers that record and analyze electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. We propose a novel processing pipeline for resource-constrained embedded systems that can infer higher-level information, such as heart-rate and feeding events, from the ECG signals in situ. Our main contributions are in proposing efficient event detection algorithms that can reliably detect fish feeding events from noisy heart-rate data based on the unique statistical properties of feeding-induced changes in the heart-rate. We evaluate our approaches using an in-house biologger that we surgically implant in twelve coral trout fish and use to collect data during an experiment for a period of ten weeks and show that our signal processing pipeline performs well with noisy ECG signals overall. Specifically, our heart-rate estimation algorithm achieves errors of less than one beat per minute even in scenarios where popular algorithms used by domain specialists perform poorly. Furthermore, our feeding detection algorithms offer improved accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms while requiring significantly reduced computational and energy resources. We implement the proposed heart-rate estimation and feeding detection algorithms on the biologger and evaluate the associated system overhead. The results show that our proposed heart-rate estimation and feeding detection algorithms can run in-situ on the biologger as they demand rather small computational and energy resources that can conveniently be provisioned. This work is an important first step towards developing effective tools for long-term monitoring of high-level parameters pertaining to the health and behavior of marine animals in the wild.