Work in progress: MiceNet: Monitoring behaviour of laboratory mice with sensor networks

Medical research uses laboratory mice for experimental studies. Currently, symptoms are manually observed and recorded, resulting in noisy data — requiring many animals to obtain statistically significant results. We propose the use of a camera sensor network attached to mice cages as a low-cost solution for continuously monitoring mouse behavior and providing remote access to the data for scientists. The benefits of this approach are discussed along with challenges encountered in the initial phases of deployment. The proposed hardware and software architecture is described and early experimentation results are presented.