Elephant Enrichment
Research Project involving the design and deployment of an audio enrichment device for elephants at Zoo Atlanta.
Team Members: Benjamin Mayo, Caden Prather, Charles Ramey, Dr. Melody Jackson
My Role: Firmware Lead, Research Lead
Duration: August 2023 - Present
Overview
In this project, we designed, built, and implemented an interactive enrichment device for the African elephants (Loxodonta africana) at Zoo Atlanta that allows them to play low-frequency sounds as they insert their trunks into an enrichment wall. Presence of elephant trunks at one of four holes were detected using time-of-flight (ToF) sensors, which would send a signal to our custom-designed waterproof speaker to play a tone. To gauge elephant interest in our device, we compared usage of the existing food-based enrichment before and after augmentation with audio.
Results
The device was installed for 7 days and 10 hours and had a positive impact on frequency and retention time with the existing enrichment, increasing frequency of usage by 81 instances and retention time by 3 hours, 28 minutes, and 23 seconds. While our audio enrichment device was successful at collecting data with 88.14% accuracy, improvements could be made to the sensing methods to reduce the rate of false actuations. Overall, the study is an example of successfully collecting longitudinal data with elephants and showed that these elephants responded positively to sound enrichment.
Current Work
We conducted a pilot study of an automated elephant trunk detection system using computer vision techniques such as background subtraction and region-based motion detection on a Google Pixel smartphone for real-time remote monitoring to allow for long-term usage.
Our results showed promise in using camera-based methods for trunk detection; however, we are doing further testing and refining of the algorithm to obtain an accurate and reliable method that could replace physical sensing methods.
