The definition of animal welfare is not uniquely agreed among different Vivariums and operators in the field. Conversely, the final goal is uniquely identified: save any animal in time, potentially providing treatments or applying procedures, and finally prevent them from any form of suffering, pain, distress.
Our vision regarding this topic is that technology should enhance the potential of staff and support their expertise, not, even tentatively, try to substitute anyone on this crucial task.
We firmly believe continuous 24/7 data collection (animal activity, running wheel data, environmental data, and more), means we can provide more insight and indications of possible trends occurring with animals. This could be disease onset or increase overall animal activity in the cage, possibly due to fightings bouts or spot-events such as circadian rhythms disruptions or sudden deaths.
Our solution enhances your (still mandatory) daily health checks providing you with a list of those cages where animals showed evident deviations in activity levels (from a statistical perspective) compared to the previous days (considered as a rolling baseline). This analysis is performed mainly, but not exclusively, leveraging on the cleanness and unbiasedness of night animal data. This is because they are less disturbed by external environmental factors and are more likely to show their phenotype due to them being more active.
You, as the final owner of the health check, will be responsible for providing your experienced evaluations and judgment of the situation, enhanced by the power of continuous activity data.
Fig 1: In the DVC® Operator User Interface, there is a specific table called “NWC” (Night Welfare Check), where the last 30 days of DVC® animal locomotion evaluations (called Anomaly score) are listed for all the registered cages of the Vivarium.
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Fig 2: In the DVC® Operator User Interface, while performing the assigned task (a), the reason behind the triggering of the NWC task is shown with clear charts (b) to the Operator.
Fig 3: In the DVC® Operator User Interface, there is a specific section called “Night Welfare Checks” in the electronic cage label, where the user can easily find (and filter) all the Anomalous activities detected on this cage.
