Project Description
Extracellular recordings in animals, made using wire implants within the brain, detect changes in the extracellular voltage when neurons discharge. Typically, electrophysiologists tether their rodent to their neural recording equipment which limits the range of possible experiments.
In this project we designed a digital wireless neural telemetry system, Rodent Scope (RoSco), which enables new experiments such as neural recordings from rodents in large outdoor environments and social experiments. It is small, lightweight and allows online user configuration. Because it uses digital communication, compared to other analog systems, it has noise immunity. It has selectable gain, bandwidth, ground reference, 10m range, 1.5 hour battery life and only 0.1% transmission losses at ranges up to 10m.
This project started soon after I first joined Thinking Systems during a visit to the recording labs with Francois Windels. Ryan Wong developed the first prototype as an undergraduate thesis project. Russell Kliese then later completely redesigned and miniaturised the system. We have made all of the electrical schematics, firmware and design documents open-source and available online. (See the paper for the links.)
Publications
D. Ball, R. Kliese, F. Windels, C. Nolan, P. Stratton, P. Sah, J. Wiles (2014) Rodent Scope: A User-Configurable Digital Wireless Telemetry System for Freely Behaving Animals, PLOS ONE 9 (2).
B. Thanigaivelan, D. Ball, J. Wiles and T. Hamilton (2010) An 8-channel neural recording system with programmable gain and bandwidth, 2nd Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA)
