Rodent scope: a user-configurable digital wireless telemetry system for freely behaving animals

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Wireless Communication Technology

Background:

• Traditional neural recording systems often limit animal movement due to wired connections.
• Existing wireless systems may suffer from noise, limited configurability, and signal interference.
• There is a need for robust, lightweight, and user-friendly wireless solutions for neural telemetry in freely behaving subjects.

Purpose of the Study:

• To design and implement a novel wireless neural telemetry system, named RoSco (Rodent Scope).
• To enable new experimental paradigms, including neural recordings during rodent navigation in large outdoor environments.
• To provide a user-configurable, lightweight, and noise-immune solution for recording neural activity from small, freely behaving animals.

Main Methods:

• Developed RoSco, a small, lightweight, user-configurable digital wireless module for neural recording.
• Utilized digital transmission technology for enhanced noise immunity and online configurable settings.
• Implemented spatial diversity reception with two antennas for resilient wireless communication.
• Enabled online user-selectable gain control, ground references, channel grounding, and bandwidth settings.
• Streamed 14 channels of neural waveforms at 20 kHz with 8-bit encoding via USB audio packets.

Main Results:

• RoSco modules can coexist with up to 31 units in the same environment on independent channels.
• Wireless communication demonstrated resilience to fading and obstacles due to spatial diversity reception.
• Online user-selectable features included gain control (500-32,000x), ground references, channel grounding, and bandwidth (300 Hz-3 kHz for action potentials, 4 Hz-3 kHz for field potentials).
• Indoor and outdoor recordings from freely behaving rodents showed comparable neural population sorting to a commercial wired system.
• The system exhibited low input-referred noise, 1.5-hour battery life, and 0.1% transmission loss up to 10 m.

Conclusions:

• RoSco provides a robust and versatile wireless neural telemetry solution for neuroscience research.
• The system's design facilitates advanced experimental paradigms, particularly in large or complex environments.
• RoSco's digital transmission, user configurability, and resilient communication offer significant advantages over existing wireless neural recording systems.