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RFID collar for monkeys
RFID could help researchers further understand social behavior among macaques, a monkey species native to South, Central and Southeast Asia.
RFID can be used to better understand the social structure of macaques, Hanuma Teja Maddali, a master’s student in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, wrote in a master’s thesis.
According to Maddali, observational learning of the interactions of social structure among members of a group is a valuable tool for primate experts and sociologists, useful for understanding the consequences of interactions under dominance relationships, as well as social-level pressures Relationship with the immune system of macaques.
Traditionally, scientists have to hand-label field observations or record data, and then pass this information through interaction matrices to represent relationships between different individuals, Maddali explained. Collecting and labeling behavioral data by hand is a very tedious process.
In addition, manual manipulation does not allow for continuous and group observations, eg, simultaneous long-term observations of each individual for multiple samples.
RFID tags, Maddali wrote in the paper, can “continuously and precisely track the location of animals and then automatically generate social network maps at high frequency.”
He cites some of the advantages of RFID data collection, including the ability to record uninterrupted changes in individuals, the ability to collect large amounts of data, and the quantitative analysis of social behavior through speed, demeanor, and intimacy between them.
RFID tags can be used to track behavior between monkeys over time (such as grooming each other), or how long a monkey will approach or move away from another (such as chasing or attracting each other) and leaving or entering a some areas (e.g., quickly move away from the feeding area when another monkey approaches).
Tracking these variables can help understand the social structure of macaques, the authors explain.
At the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Georgia, the experiment was conducted with live animals in metal cages for 60 consecutive days.
The cage houses six male monkeys, each wearing a collar with four Ubisense battery-powered RFID tags embedded inside.
The researchers also used an installed Ubisens 7000 RF reader to receive the tags’ RF transmissions (transmissions at 6-8 GHz/s) and then send the information to a server via a local area network (LAN).
The server already has Ubisense’s proprietary software that calculates and records each tag’s position and body posture. One disadvantage of the system is that it cannot distinguish between slapstick and brawling behavior.
“For example, a chase at a certain location at a time can be classified as play or hostile behavior,” maddali wrote.
“Macaque monkeys use rich visual and social gestures, such as yawning, smacking, grimacing, growling, and squeaking. Combining these sources of information in this work, with additional video or audio, can provide more detailed Information on social structure, capturing complex behavioral habits. Future work will also aim to incorporate a broader probabilistic framework to improve social structure inference.”
This is not the first time that RFID technology has been used to study animal behavior.
Dallas Zoo in Texas, usingRFIDTrack elephants in real time, study their behavior, and determine if they’re getting enough exercise.
(The exclusive manuscript of rfid world network, please indicate the source author for reprinting!)
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