Group housing: A robotic system to track and interact with individuals

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant Individually housing animals even for a short period is known to have a negative influence on behavior learning ability and physiology Group housed rodents are better able to cope with stress through improved behavioral and physiological responses Unfortunately many experiments including those designed to measure behavior circadian activity and or neurological studies necessitate single housing due to technological restrictions Automated delivery of an experimental intervention such as a stimulus a food reward or gentle nudging to disturb sleep is easily accomplished with single animals but is complicated in group housed environments The overall goal of this proposal is to develop a novel cage enclosure designed to group house multiple physically similar animals with long term computer aided video monitoring and radio frequency identification RFID to correctly and accurately identify and track individual animals within a group of four and to automatically apply an intervention stimulus to one or more animals within the group This system will employ a robotic arm situated directly above the cage which when tied to the video tracking module and RFID reader can selectively apply an intervention stimulus i e gentle nudging food air puff to a specific animal based on state specific feedback The defined state may be classified using data collected via video tracking wireless electroencephalograph EEG measurement wireless biosensor measurement of specific neurochemicals or other wireless physiological measurements The system will be configurable so that the intervention stimulus may be applied to an individual animal based on physiological parameters defined by the researcher In Phase I Pinnacle successfully designed and tested a prototype system that identified one animal in a cohort of four and sleep deprived that animal by nudging for hours Sleep rebound was successfully measured to prove feasibility of the system Phase II will continue this development by testing and refining animal tracking and behavior involving multiple animals increasing the accuracy of video tracking and increasing the types of intervention stimuli available to the researcher by creation of multiple arm attachments that can be easily interchanged At the completion of Phase II we will have a complete turn key hardware and software solution that will be commercially available to the research community PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE CNS drug approval rates are lower than drugs for other therapeutic areas take years to reach the market and have higher failure rates in the later part of the development cycle equating to higher costs New tools are critical to improve the pre clinical data With the growing body of evidence that animals raised in isolation have different behaviors and physiological responses than animals housed together there is a need for a group housed research environment By providing such a habitat for CNS studies for example we are hopeful that this may improve the results of pre clinical screening for drugs along with providing new research in behavior