title: Rodent scope: a user-configurable digital wireless telemetry system for freely behaving animals.
abstract: This paper describes the design and implementation of a wireless neural telemetry system that enables new experimental paradigms, such as neural recordings during rodent navigation in large outdoor environments. RoSco, short for Rodent Scope, is a small lightweight user-configurable module suitable for digital wireless recording from freely behaving small animals. Due to the digital transmission technology, RoSco has advantages over most other wireless modules of noise immunity and online user-configurable settings. RoSco digitally transmits entire neural waveforms for 14 of 16 channels at 20 kHz with 8-bit encoding which are streamed to the PC as standard USB audio packets. Up to 31 RoSco wireless modules can coexist in the same environment on non-overlapping independent channels. The design has spatial diversity reception via two antennas, which makes wireless communication resilient to fading and obstacles. In comparison with most existing wireless systems, this system has online user-selectable independent gain control of each channel in 8 factors from 500 to 32,000 times, two selectable ground references from a subset of channels, selectable channel grounding to disable noisy electrodes, and selectable bandwidth suitable for action potentials (300 Hz-3 kHz) and low frequency field potentials (4 Hz-3 kHz). Indoor and outdoor recordings taken from freely behaving rodents are shown to be comparable to a commercial wired system in sorting for neural populations. The module has low input referred noise, battery life of 1.5 hours and transmission losses of 0.1% up to a range of 10 m.
authors.affiliation: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology, Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ball
authors.affiliation: TOPTICA Photonics AG, Lochhamer Schlag 19, Gräfelfing, Germany.
authors.forename: Russell
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kliese
authors.affiliation: Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Francois
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Windels
authors.affiliation: Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Nolan
authors.affiliation: Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Stratton
authors.affiliation: Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Pankaj
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sah
authors.affiliation: School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Janet
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wiles
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology; D004594:Electrophysiology / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D004867:Equipment Design; D051381:Rats; D013686:Telemetry / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D059015:Wireless Technology / Q000295:instrumentation