Abstract
While miniature inertial sensors offer a promising means for precisely detecting, quantifying and classifying animal behaviors, versatile inertial sensing devices adapted for small, freely-moving laboratory animals are still lacking. We developed a standalone and cost-effective platform for performing high-rate wireless inertial measurements of head movements in rats. Our system is designed to enable real-time bidirectional communication between the headborne inertial sensing device and third party systems, which can be used for precise data timestamping and low-latency motion-triggered applications. We illustrate the usefulness of our system in diverse experimental situations. We show that our system can be used for precisely quantifying motor responses evoked by external stimuli, for characterizing head kinematics during normal behavior and for monitoring head posture under normal and pathological conditions obtained using unilateral vestibular lesions. We also introduce and validate a novel method for automatically quantifying behavioral freezing during Pavlovian fear conditioning experiments, which offers superior performance in terms of precision, temporal resolution and efficiency. Thus, this system precisely acquires movement information in freely-moving animals, and can enable objective and quantitative behavioral scoring methods in a wide variety of experimental situations.
Highlights
Inertial sensing microelectromechanical systems have opened new avenues for the measurement of body kinematics
Communication with the inertial measurement units (IMUs) is implemented via Bluetooth, a reliable and widespread wireless communication technology that offers an excellent trade-off in terms of performances and integrability
Untethered inertial measurements are typically performed at 1–100 Hz on relatively large animals using bulky telemetric devices or accelerometers coupled to onboard data-logging systems
Summary
Inertial sensing microelectromechanical systems have opened new avenues for the measurement of body kinematics. IMUs offer a way to obtain accurate measurements of motor responses and locomotor behavior in various animal models[19,20,21,22,23]. They could advantageously replace tedious and subjective observational scoring techniques in a wide range of experimental situations, as shown for the automatic detection of arousal states and behavioral sequences such as grooming, eating and rearing[24,25]. Measuring precisely-timed motor responses is highly relevant to many research domains in the neurosciences, when combined with electrophysiological recordings In some cases, such as vestibular research, IMUs have the potential to enable new approaches. These examples demonstrate that our system has the potential to considerably simplify and refine the acquisition of movement information in a variety of experimental paradigms
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