Microprocessor based activity cage

Activity cages have wide applications in pharmacology, toxicology, psychology, neurology, physiology and entomology. To monitor and to provide information about animal activity continuously for a given period of time, activity cages are used. The activity of the drug/toxin injected animal will have three types of movements, namely, ambulatory, stereotypic activities and convulsions. This paper discusses the various hardware and software aspects of such a system that has been fabricated, tested and used for recording animal activities. The instrument uses infrared source/sensor pairs to detect ambulatory and stereotypic activities. To detect convulsions, the authors depended on vibration sensors and FFT techniques