Tens of millions of rodents are used for scientific research yearly. These animals are necessary for diseasemodel testing and are essential for pre-clinical development of human therapeutics. Despite this greatneed, the current best practice for management of mouse colony health relies on manual checking, whichis stressful for animals, time consuming and error-prone. While advances have been made in maintainingenvironmental conditions like air quality, cage temperature, etc., little has been done to advance theburden of daily cage observations that are required for laboratory animal general health monitoring aswell as for defining humane endpoints for particular experiments like mortality studies. Our mission isto facilitate research by developing novel devices that will reduce stress on laboratory animals, boostdata integrity of animal-related research, and optimize management of rodent colonies. Specifically, wepropose the development of a remote cage monitoring system with automated event detection using adigital biomarker for general mouse health. Our system brings Internet of Things and big data to animalmanagement 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 intuitiveeasy-to-use interfaces. Our device will integrate with existing animal housing racks and caging for easyadoption by users providing live or recorded video that shows laboratory animals when they are active sousers can adequately monitor animal health in accordance with laboratory animal welfare standards. Aim1 focuses on creating and validating mouse behavioral metrics for home cage health monitoring and virtualcage inspection. For Aim 2, we will create and validate a digital health biomarker using facility-widemouse 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 willprovide the foundational work necessary for wide-spread utilization of a system that eliminates the mostpressing burdens associated pre-clinical research while dramatically improving animal breeding and healthdata acquisition and analytics. We believe this is a necessary technological innovation to accelerate humantherapeutic development and eliminate major bottlenecks currently impeding medical research output.
Public Health Relevance Statement: 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.
Project Terms: Adoption ; Air ; Animal Experimentation ; Animal Experimental Use ; Animal Research ; Animal Husbandry ; Animal Husbandries ; Animal Welfare ; Animals ; Laboratory Animals ; Automation ; Animal Behavior ; Boston ; Breeding ; Censuses ; Communicable Diseases ; Infectious Disease Pathway ; Infectious Diseases ; Infectious Disorder ; Computer Vision Systems ; computer vision ; Containment ; Data Sources ; Animal Disease Models ; Ear ; Electronics ; electronic device ; Foundations ; Goals ; Grant ; Health ; Health Status ; Level of Health ; Animal Housing ; Human ; Modern Man ; Industrialization ; Infection ; Manuals ; Methods ; Mission ; mortality ; Mus ; Mice ; Mice Mammals ; Murine ; United States National Institutes of Health ; NIH ; National Institutes of Health ; Optics ; optical ; Personal Satisfaction ; well-being ; wellbeing ; Pharmacology ; Research ; Research Personnel ; Investigators ; Researchers ; Rodent ; Rodentia ; Rodents Mammals ; Sleep ; Software Engineering ; Computer Software Development ; Computer Software Engineering ; Stress ; Technology ; Temperature ; Testing ; Time ; Universities ; Work ; Medical Research ; Caring ; Guidelines ; Clip ; animal breeding ; animal care ; base ; improved ; Clinical ; Physiological ; Physiologic ; Ensure ; Intuition ; Visual ; wasting ; Therapeutic ; Electrical Engineering ; Event ; Source ; System ; Respiratory distress ; Outcome Study ; Services ; Performance ; animal data ; participatory sensing ; remote sensing ; tech development ; technology development ; Practice Management ; novel ; novel technologies ; new technology ; technological innovation ; drinking ; disorder model ; Disease model ; Devices ; Regulation ; Emerging Infectious Diseases ; Emerging Communicable Diseases ; animal facility ; data integrity ; Intervention Strategies ; interventional strategy ; Intervention ; Laboratory Animal Models ; Data ; Detection ; Ph.D. ; PhD ; Doctor of Philosophy ; D.V.M. ; Doctor of Veterinary Medicine ; Infectious Diseases / Laboratory ; Infectious Diseases Research ; M.P.H. ; Master of Public Health ; pre-clinical testing ; Preclinical Testing ; Reproducibility ; Wireless Technology ; wireless ; Monitor ; Process ; Grouping ; groupings ; Development ; developmental ; Behavioral ; Output ; care burden ; cost ; feeding ; data modeling ; model of data ; model the data ; modeling of the data ; virtual ; digital ; design ; designing ; Outcome ; cost efficient ; Consumption ; innovation ; innovate ; innovative ; data acquisition ; pre-clinical research ; preclinical research ; mouse model ; murine model ; therapeutic development ; therapeutic agent development ; Biological Markers ; bio-markers ; biologic marker ; biomarker ; humane endpoint ; humane end point ; operation ; cloud based ; Big Data ; BigData ; health data ; Data Analytics ; data access ; Internet of Things ; experimental study ; experiment ; experimental research ; preclinical development ; pre-clinical development ; welfare ; wireless communication ; COVID-19 ; COVID19 ; CV-19 ; CV19 ; corona virus disease 2019 ; coronavirus disease 2019 ; intelligent algorithm ; smart algorithm ; automated algorithm ; automatic algorithm ; web platform ; internet platform ; archive data ; archiving data ; archived data ; digital health ; personal protective equipment ; personal protection equipment ; Home ;
