Home Cage Monitoring

Home cage monitoring provides continuous, undisturbed observation of rodent behavior in the home environment using overhead video, side-view cameras, or multi-sensor arrays. Unlike traditional behavioral tests that measure responses in novel, experimenter-controlled environments, home cage monitoring captures the full repertoire of spontaneous behavior — locomotion, rearing, grooming, nesting, sleeping, feeding, drinking, and social interactions — in the environment where the animal spends its entire life.

This approach eliminates acute stress artifacts from handling, novel environment exposure, and transport that confound conventional testing. It is particularly valuable for detecting subtle behavioral changes that occur over hours or days, such as progressive motor decline in neurodegenerative models, sickness behavior following immune challenge, pain-related behavioral suppression, or circadian fragmentation. Machine learning-based pose estimation (DeepLabCut, SLEAP) and behavior classification now enable automated scoring of complex behavioral repertoires from home cage video.

ConductMaze integrates with overhead and side-view camera systems, IR illumination for dark-phase recording, and sensor arrays (food/water access, nest quality scoring) to provide continuous multimodal home cage data. The software performs automated behavior classification, generates ethograms, computes activity budgets (percentage of time in each behavioral state), and identifies behavioral transitions and bout structures.