VAMP: A Video Activity Monitoring Processor for the Registration of Animal Locomotor Activity

Abstract

In many bioenergetic investigations, the discrimination of resting and activity metabolism represents an important problem. Personal observation, a possible solution to this problem, becomes very impractical in highly automated long-term experiments. An adequate method of measuring activity should meet the following demands : it should be able to quantify the movement of several objects simultaneously, it should be usable with animals of different shapes and sizes, and it should cause minimal disturbance to the animals.