Our GroupScan is a fully automated tool that provides support for this type of experiments, where a group of lab animals is housed in a single device/arena. The behavior/activity of this group of lab animals is analyzed, where the importance of behaviors of individual animal is not as important as the average behavior measurement of the group of animals. Very often, this group of lab animals are fruit flies, zebra fish, honey bees, etc., though the tool can also be equally applied to group of mice/rats, or larger animals.

GroupScan is used to test the levels of activity of the animals as a group, rhythms of their movements including randomness, inclination to stay close to the walls or move closer to the center of the cage, etc. Many such experiments are conducted in multiple groups of animals simultaneously.

GroupScan works on a unified background. It outputs detailed statistics about group animal behavior such as total average speed, active average speed, live count event, etc. It also allows the user to define specific events for detection.

The techniques for automation of the categorization and quantification of group activity amongst animals have been applied to achieve high throughput screening. System architecture has been optimized for high throughput screening at 96 arenas per system. The High‐Throughput product option is necessary to analyze more than a single arena simultaneously. The Realtime Option is necessary to perform realtime analysis where the live video feed into the computer is compressed, encoded, saved to the hard drive while simultaneously full analysis of the video is performed.

Many advanced features are incorporated, including supporting full color analysis, automatic adaptation to non‐uniform or changing environment, automated handling of light/dark areas, variable speed playback of specific video segment for specific detected behavior, etc.

Complete Turn‐key systems including all necessary Hardware and Software are available. Custom design of your environment to facilitate analysis, including lighting condition setup, IR/red light setup, cage enclosures, video integration, and video‐feed to computer is also available.