CollarID
Hear What GPS Can't

The first wildlife collar with long-term acoustic monitoring. 150 grams, solar-powered, designed for years in the field.

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Acoustic Recordings

No other wildlife collar captures long-term audio in the field. CollarID's acoustic system — optimized with insights from acoustic experts at MIT and in industry — records what existing platforms miss entirely.

Hyena

STFT spectrogram of hyena

Hyena Running and Vocalizing

STFT spectrogram of hyena running and vocalizing

Research questions you can now answer

GPS tells you where an animal goes. CollarID tells you what it's doing, hearing, and breathing — in the field, at full duty cycle, for the length of the deployment.

Was the hyena running or standing still when it vocalized?

Synchronized audio, motion, and GPS on the same animal — behavior comes from direct measurement, not from guessing it out of movement alone.

What rare calls are we missing with triggered recorders?

Continuous field audio captures the unusual events alongside the common ones — the training data triggered recorders can't collect.

How does wildfire smoke change free-ranging animal behavior?

Particulate, gas, temperature, and humidity on the same timeline as movement and vocalization — exposure and its consequences in one file.

Hardware Specifications

150 grams. Solar-powered. Built to survive a lion bite. Designed for years in the field, not weeks.

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CollarID Mk II — assembled wildlife collar with integrated solar panel, sensors, and antennas

Engineered for the Field

A conventional research collar in this category weighs 1–2 kg, with most of that mass devoted to a battery large enough to sustain a roughly 4-hour GPS fix cadence over a year-long deployment. CollarID Mk II runs 150 g, on solar, at fix rates several times finer than convention.

150 g

Total weight, with multi-modal sensors and continuous bioacoustics — vs 1–2 kg typical for year-long collars.

5 min

Field-validated GPS + LoRaWAN uplink cadence, sustained over several months on free-grazing cattle — vs ~4 h convention.

Perpetual

Solar-augmented operation engineered for indefinite uptime; no battery-swap retrieval required.

How we got here, and the honest trade — click to expand

That isn't battery chemistry magic. Every subsystem — radios, sensors, MCU duty cycles, file system, peripheral wake/sleep — has been individually power-budgeted and hand-tuned against its physical lower bound. The configurator's Power tab exposes the same per-subsystem energy equation the firmware uses, so you can preview the longevity of any deployment schedule before committing it.

The honest trade. The most expensive premium collars include satellite uplinks (Iridium, Globalstar) for zero-infrastructure deployments. CollarID currently uses LoRa / LoRaWAN, which requires terrestrial gateway coverage or a local base station at the deployment site. A modular satellite-uplink node and an automated drop-off mechanism are both in active development — the drop-off is currently in pilot testing.

Exploded view of the Mk I prototype shown here. Mk II carries the same enclosure architecture — polycarbonate cover, machined anodized-aluminum base, gasketed perimeter. The assembled Mk II is pictured at the top of this section.

Mechanical Housing

Designed for durability. Validated using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) against the bite force of a lion. Polycarbonate cover, machined anodized-aluminum base, EPDM gasket compressed by six perimeter screws — survived two consecutive cycles of pressurised warm-water spray with surfactant detergent in in-house testing, with no ingress or post-test degradation.

Finite Element Analysis

FEA simulations validate structural integrity, ensuring the device can withstand the physical demands of tracking wild animals like lions and hyenas.

In the Field

Deployed on wild and domestic species across Africa, South America, and North America. Every deployment generates real data and refines the platform.

Spotted Hyena — Botswana

Deployed November 2025 in collaboration with Rohan Wadhwa, wildlife ecologist and doctoral student at the University of Georgia, studying spotted hyena movement ecology and human-wildlife conflict mitigation. Collected 3 weeks of continuous nocturnal acoustic data.

CollarID deployed on spotted hyena in Botswana
CollarID deployed on spotted hyena in Botswana

Wildfire Prevention Goats — Chile

Two-week pilot with Buena Cabra and the MIT City Science Group, monitoring goat grazing behavior as a natural method for clearing dry wildfire fuel. Acoustic and IMU data captured feeding patterns to measure vegetation clearing effectiveness.

CollarID deployment on goats in Chile
CollarID on goat in Chile
CollarID on goat in Chile

Cattle — New York

Multi-month deployment in partnership with Northaven Pastures, including through winter conditions. Three collars tracked cattle behavior and environmental exposure across seasons.

CollarID deployment on cattle in New York

Community Dogs — Kenya

Pilot deployment on domestic dogs in indigenous communities, in collaboration with Stephanie Mitchell, doctoral candidate in Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Washington.

A New Lens on Life

CollarID began as a PhD thesis at the MIT Media Lab. It's now a field-proven platform shipping to researchers worldwide.

Origin

Designed by Patrick Chwalek, PhD, CollarID was developed at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with Kioxia Corporation, MIT researchers, and in consultation with National Geographic and the broader ecology and conservation community.

The Mk I platform has been validated across multiple field deployments — from spotted hyenas in Botswana to cattle surviving New York winters. Every deployment has returned usable data and informed the next iteration.

Mk II: Production-Ready

The Mk II builds on thousands of hours of field data with an optimized system architecture, lower assembly cost, and a larger solar panel for extended autonomous operation. Units are now available for pilot deployments.

Active development

CollarID is co-developed with researchers, and a handful of features are still partial, in-progress, or constrained to a specific configuration. Before planning a deployment, review the known limitations & in-progress features — and reach out so we can validate your intended schedule in the lab first.

Beyond the wild

The same multi-modal sensing that classifies a hyena's behavior in Botswana works on animals closer to home — equine activity and sleep, working-dog welfare across shift cycles, livestock signals around heat stress, parturition, or husbandry events. If off-the-shelf trackers can't cover your question, get in touch.

Email about a working-animal application

Deploy CollarID

Whether you're a researcher, conservation organization, or funder — we'd like to hear from you. Mk II units are available for pilot deployments.

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