Development and Validation of a Universal Measurement System for Measuring the Performance of Mammals

Exercise wheels for mammals are commonly used as test systems in many medical research areas. Studies may be related to many different areas such as vitamins, hormones (as dopamine), and physical endurance. As research develops the scope and size of the studies increase and the requirements of the test system might change. In order to conduct the experiments effectively, there is a need to increase the number of test stations, and the test station may also be required to handle physically larger mammals. This study presents and validates a wireless system for endurance tests. The system was validated on mice and humans. It is scalable, and can be expandable up to 254 test stations. In the case of the exercise wheel with mice, the ADEA system was used as a reference. The initial validation was done by comparing the activity measured by both systems in mice with different hormone dopamine levels. The correlation coefficients between the systems estimated activity levels were in the range from 0.916 to 0.967. The new system enables quantitative measurements of the activity level using standard SI units (meters and seconds, respectively). In the validation with humans, runners were clocked by the system and manually. The lowest correlation coefficient obtained during these measurements was 0.864. Thus, both applications showed a high correlation with conventional methods.