CHAT Jr: Wearable Bioacoustics System For Two-Way Communication Research Between Humans and Cetaceans

The Cetacean Hearing Augmentation and Telemetry (CHAT) Junior system is a wearable computer developed to assist marine biologists in their study of wild dolphin communication. By equipping marine biologists with the ability to record, play, and recognize synthetic and naturally produced dolphin vocalizations, the CHAT Jr wearable provides an interface for cross-species two-way acoustic interactions. Each of our CHAT Jr systems leverages a real-time machine learning-based acoustic classification model running on a Google Pixel 9 smartphone and provides all the necessary peripherals required for conducting interactive experiments while researchers observe dolphins in their native Atlantic Ocean habitat. With the exceptions of our underwater keyboard and custom waterproof enclosure, our systems are comprised entirely of commercially available off-the-shelf components. In this work, we provide an overview of our two-way dolphin communication research and detail how deep-learning classification models are enabling field-tunable adaptation for novel mimic examples from dolphins. Additionally, we describe our ruggedized waterproof wearable and off the shelf acoustics system as a resource for acoustic machine learning practitioners who require extensible hardware systems for data collection in harsh environments.