Recent Advances in Telemetry Monitoring and Analysis for Laboratory Animals

Measurement of physiological parameters in laboratory animals plays an important role in evaluating the biomedical applications. It has been widely known that a telemetry system is useful for these studies, because the telemetry system can obtain physiological measurements from conscious and unrestrained laboratory animals. Maurey was the first to report on a telemetry experiment in the scientific literature (see Mackay, 1970). Mackay wrote the experiment as follows: “A rubber bulb detects the shortening of the pectoral muscle of a pigeon by its thickening the pneumatic signal traveling a rubber tube to a bulb pushing a stylus on a smoked arum. A flapping vane at the wingtip opens and closes an electric contact to indicate the relative duration of the period of elevation and depression of the wing.” One of the first telemetry experiments with the use of a radio signal is reported by Barr (1954). From the late 1950’s, several research groups have developed radio-telemetry devices for laboratory animals (Gold & Malcolm, 1957; Essler & Folk, 1961; Franklin, et al., 1964). Although telemetry technology for monitoring laboratory animals have already existed since the early 1950’s as described above, fully implantable and reliable telemetry devices for monitoring physiological functions in laboratory animals have been made commercially available since the late 1980’s. Advances and further miniaturization of the implantable devices in the beginning of 1990’s have provided to measure electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyogram (EMG), electroencephalogram (EEG), blood pressure (BP), body temperature (BT), and locomotor activity (LA). Therefore, the number of publications in which radio-telemetric results in laboratory animals has been tremendously increased for 2 decade. In these days, many companies commercially supply the radio-telemetry implants for monitoring physiological parameters. In this report, I would like to introduce a newly developed telemetry system in Japanese company and some useful software to analyze ECG data in the fields of cardiology and pathophysiology as well as pharmacology and toxicology. Further, I describe some experimental studies using a telemetry system and applications.