The goal of this PoC grant was to bring to completion and potential commercialization a novel platform for analyzing complex animal behavior. The new platform, which we called “The Educage”, allows fully automatic, hands-free assessment of higher cognitive functions in freely behaving animals. The Educage has many advantages that outperform existing technologies. It allows a rigorous statistical assessment of complex behaviors in laboratory animals (e.g. we use probabilistic statistics to analyze perceptual learning in mice). The Educage design is designed to be hands-free, fully automatic, affordable, and user friendly. Importantly, the Educage allows researchers the flexibility to monitor, analyze and manipulate the experiment during the behavior. In addition to Educage-Audition we developed an olfactory platform (Educage Olfactory). The Educage is now reliably used in our lab to analyze perceptual learning in mice and is well suited for being a new and rigorous behavioral platform in the near future.
Our achievements are:
• extensive product testing in the lab.
• New Hardware configuration that is 10 fold cheaper than initially designed.
• User friendly software.
• Use of 3 in house system (in house) + recently shipped system abroad and 1 pending.
• Commercialization feasibility report.
• Product design in advanced stages .
• Scientific publication in preparatory stage.
Our conclusions is that we will pursue an option of selling the product to an external company that will use the technology.
However, the product is not ready yet. To increase our chances for good visibility we need that our colleagues from the scientific community will use it outside our lab to make sure it is bug free. In addition, we are working on a 3D printed version of the learning and electronics to be completed in a few months.
