Mouse Home Cage Health Monitoring Using Virtual Cage Inspection and a Digital Health Biomarker

AbstractTens of millions of rodents are used for scientific research yearly. These animals are necessary for disease model testing and are essential for pre-clinical development of human therapeutics. Despite this great need, the current best practice for management of mouse colony health relies on manual checking, which is stressful for animals, time consuming and error-prone. While advances have been made in maintaining environmental conditions like air quality, cage temperature, etc., little has been done to advance the burden of daily cage observations that are required for laboratory animal general health monitoring as well as for defining humane endpoints for particular experiments like mortality studies. Our mission is to facilitate research by developing novel devices that will reduce stress on laboratory animals, boost data integrity of animal-related research, and optimize management of rodent colonies. Specifically, we propose the development of a remote cage monitoring system with automated event detection using a digital biomarker for general mouse health. Our system brings Internet of Things and big data to animal management services, including the benefits of remote sensing/observation with optical cameras, real- time and archived data access through smart devices, wireless communications and sensing, and intuitive easy-to-use interfaces. Our device will integrate with existing animal housing racks and caging for easy adoption by users providing live or recorded video that shows laboratory animals when they are active so users can adequately monitor animal health in accordance with laboratory animal welfare standards. Aim 1 focuses on creating and validating mouse behavioral metrics for home cage health monitoring and virtual cage inspection. For Aim 2, we will create and validate a digital health biomarker using facility-wide mouse cage monitoring. This system will save time and money,improve data integrity and availability, and optimize facility operations for animal husbandry and management services. This submission will provide the foundational work necessary for wide-spread utilization of a system that eliminates the most pressing burdens associated pre-clinical research while dramatically improving animal breeding and health data acquisition and analytics. We believe this is a necessary technological innovation to accelerate human therapeutic development and eliminate major bottlenecks currently impeding medical research output.Project Narrative The utilization of laboratory animal models of disease and for pharmacological testing is ever increasing. This puts greater demand on efficient methods and technology to maintain welfare and handling of research animals as well as the ease of management of animal facilities. With this increase in research animal usage, it has become more tedious to complete the daily rodent health and cage check. This task must occur daily by regulation to ensure well-being of research animals and high quality study outcomes. Current best practices are error-prone, expensive, and time-consuming involving billions of manual observations and wasting tens of millions of dollars per year. We propose the development of technologies that will digitize and automate home cage monitoring for rodents.