Startle measurement system
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Startle measurement system

With our startle measurement system response times are measured and analyzed. The system runs on industry-standard PCs, and consists of the animal cages, an electronics box, and in-house developped software. Up till now, the cage design and building was performed in the lab, and the electronics box is set up such that any cage will connect easily.

Electronics

We offer a complete package for measuring the startle respons of small animals to a wide range of stimuli.
The current system supports sound, light and electric shocks and has additional relay outputs.
The sound channel has both a programmable waveform output (sine, quare, triangle) up to 100 kHz, with a continuously adjustable level up to 130 dB. Noise signals can be set in 64 steps of 2 dB.
All timing of the output channels is performed with a precision of 0.1 ms.
The system features 16 channels of 14-bit input precision. with a sampling interval of 0.1 ms. They are either used for motion or ultrasound detection.

Software

Our modular software package features a completely programmable interface to the hardware and an experiment management control system. The heart of the latter is a flexible database, containing all the information of both the experiments and all other relevant parameters.
The hardware control software both controls the timing of experiments, including rest and feeding times. From this scenario a test, including all stimuli in any order can be started, even based on database values or random numbers. Both the control variables, and the reduced data (startle resonse time, peak resonse time, activity ratios, but also any used-defined test) is stored in the database.

Optional modules include SPSS © export capabilities for the database and signal analysis software (FFT etc) for determination of system constants.
Last modification: "Oct 16 2003". Just mail us for more information.