The rodent Activity Wheel represents a very simple and clever way to register animal physical activity in its home cage environment.
The use of this high throughput tool is particularly relevant for research involving circadian rhythms, phenotyping and drug testing.
Basically the animals are housed individually in the home cages equipped with the running wheel. The total number of wheel rotation made by the animal is displayed on the external LE907 individual counter or LE3806 multicounter devices.
LE3806 multicounter allows storing the data in userdefined time intervals. The data can be visualized directly from the multicounter display and/or exported to the SeDaCom PC interface (through RS 232 serial port) in a format compatible with Excel. The new SEDACOM 2.0 version (not included with the LE3806 multicounter) provides an easy and convenient way to visualize and export the data (number of total rotations by user-defined interval of time) on a computer for further analysis.
The wheel assembly is used with standard polycarbonate rodent cages provided with their wire lid. The wheel is built outside the home cage to preserve animal life space.
Most of the non-electrical cage components are autoclavable.