Homecage design for long term, 24/7 monitoring
Group-housing in social context
Spontaneous behavior
Operant conditioning
Learning and memory tasks
Spatial and temporal behavior
Discrimination learning
The IntelliCage, a fully automated system allows you to assess the home cage behavior and cognitive performance of up to 16 individual mice or 8 rats separately while they are living in a social environment. This unique experimental setup fosters natural social behavior in a biologically relevant, enriched but highly standardized home cage context. In this way, the IntelliCage minimizes the need for handling and human intervention, increasing task validity, data reproducibility, and ensuring a high level of animal welfare.
RFID transponder-tagged animals are individually recognized in the fully automated conditioning corners that evaluate spontaneous behavior, operant/associative learning, and memory. The four corners are equipped with sensors (continuous 24h-recording of behavioral events) and actors (allowing the system to feedback on animals’ behavior in a pre-defined way). Together with the software package using a programmable user interface, this unique sensor/actor principle grants direct behavioral shaping of group-housed animals in an all-in-one system according to diverse research interests. The visually designed paradigms run fully automated, allowing for efficient continuous testing and monitoring of large experimental animal cohorts.