Animal alert: you are getting warmer or cooler

In endotherms, body temperature exhibits seasonal, circadian, and ultradian fluctuations that can be very predictable (seasonal and circadian) or somewhat unpredictable (ultradian). Variation in temperature profiles have been linked to an number of biological events including the onset of reproduction activity, parturition, illness, a decrease in fitness, and psychological stress. Changes in these patterns could be considered as a integrative and accurate indicator of welfare (Blache and Maloney 2017, Trethowan et al., 2016). Changes in a temperature profile can be defined via several characteristics, including the mesor or average of the daily temperature, the amplitude of the circadian rhythm over a day, or the number of ultradian events within a day. The capacity to monitor these predictable or unpredictable variations in the parameters of body temperature profiles would allow us not only to monitor the welfare of lab animals, but also to predict biological events such as parturition which is preceded by a decrease in temperature.

A very simple way to measure temperature is to implant transponders than can measure and deliver body temperature data very frequently (every 5 min). This project seeks the development of a flexible system that could:

  1. capture live data generated by temperature transponders from individual animals from a receiving platform (most of the data would be formatted as text or csv),
  2. analyse the profile for detecting specific changes according the historical data and a set parameters and,
  3. alert the researcher/animal career that body temperatures are deviated using a phone application giving animal ID, profile, and changes in set parameters.

This project is proposed by Dr Dominique Blache (School of Agriculture and Environment), Prof Shane Maloney (School of Human Science) and Prof Valerie Verhasselt (School of Molecular Science).

Client

Contact Person: Dominique Blache
Telephone: 08 6488 3735
Email: [email protected]
Preferred method of contact: email
Location: UWA Crawley, Soil Science Building Room 1.021

Client Unavailability

None

IP Exploitation Model

The client wishes to use a Creative Commons CC BY-NC model to deal with IP embodied in the project.