Week 12 Report
Donny met with our client on Tuesday to discuss our progress on the activity wheel and to get his thoughts on some new ideas. We had a team meeting to brainstorm new ideas and discuss the client's feedback.
Week 11 Report
This week we met with Dr. Wozniak, director of the Wash U Animal Behavior Core, to get advice on how we can make the traditional activity wheel more pain-informative. We discussed the CatWalk and DigiGait assays. These assays use cameras beneath a glass pane under the mouse to track its paw placement and pressure applied through the paws. He recommended looking for ways to monitor the gait of the animal and a way to measure the force they exert on the rungs of the activity wheel. His advice has given us a few more ideas on how we can get more information out of a mouse's use of the activity wheel.
Week 10 Report
This week we contacted the Department of Comparative Medicine and the Animal Behavioral Core to get access to the rodent barrier and to set up a visit to the Animal Behavioral Core where we can learn about pain assays used in WashU research.
Week 9 Report
This week we created our website where we added our presentations, weekly reports, and project information. We will update the site with weekly reports.
Week 8 Report
This week, we started designing the website for our project. Donny will meet with members of the Tang Lab to learn about how to get access to the rodent barrier. At the barrier, we plan to learn the requirements for our project to be used at the barrier. We also plan to observe the use of pain assays at the Animal Behavior Core in the future to hear about what they think are the best ways of monitoring pain in mice.
Week 7 Report
This week we worked on our preliminary presentation and report. Kiran presented on behalf of our group to the class. We are starting to search for ways to build our website.
Week 6 Report
This week we did research into existing patents on and products featuring activity wheels. We noticed that most activity wheels feature the same type of data collection – a hall effect sensor collects rotation data. We could not find an example of a product that has been designed to collect data more specific to pain. Most products list drug-testing as potential uses because voluntary activity is used to measure behavioral changes in mice such as the development of depression.
Week 5 Report
We are learning more about the other pain assays in use by members of the lab. One question that came up this week is whether the wheel will be a traditional standing wheel or a plate-like wheel that sits horizontally in the cage. Data collection may be easier in the horizontal configuration because it would allow us to hide more of the components beneath the wheel, but it could take up too much living space of the animal in this configuration. One individual from another lab said that the plate-like wheel collected better data and was used more by the mice. We are also deciding on if we want other features to work while the wheel is in the cage or should require additional setup for use outside of the cage.
Week 4 Report
We have all met with our client in person. Our client wants us to visit the rodent barrier at his facility to see how the animal behavior group uses other types of equipment to collect activity data on mice. Our client also said that the window for data collection is only 2 hours, and that features he would like could be grip force measurement data collection or a motor for involuntary movement data collection. We are weighing the benefits of a traditional mouse wheel versus a dish-like mouse wheel. For something like a grip force measurements while on the wheel, a big challenge will be to collect data from a moving wheel or platform – if we have a small computer, it may need to be move with the wheel making wired power even less feasible.
Week 3 Report
We are currently at the beginning of the ideation stage for the features we expect the client will want out of the activity wheel based on other products on the market. We will meet with our client on 9/13 to get more details on the specifications of the design, but we know that the activity wheel should be able to collect data on mouse activity like speed and distance traveled. We would like for data collection by the user to be as automated as possible – so that the user does not have to read the data off a display alone but can rather have it stored somewhere for them. We are thinking of using raspberry pi to automatically store data onto local drives or to cloud storage and to power a display for the data.