A neural interface includes a first dielectric material having at least one first opening for a first electrical conducting material, a first electrical conducting material in the first opening, and at least one first interconnection trace electrical conducting material connected to the first electrical conducting material. A stiffening shank material is located adjacent the first dielectric material, the first electrical conducting material, and the first interconnection trace electrical conducting material.

A smart cage includes radiofrequency transceivers and tags attached to laboratory animals. The tags include sensors to detect monitorable conditions of the laboratory animals. The sensors include working electrodes, counter electrodes, reference electrodes, and potentiostats. The top surface of the electrodes is coated with ionophores or enzymes which detect the monitorable conditions of the laboratory animals.

A system, device and method monitoring whether a core temperature of a warm-blooded pet animal is within a normal range for the pet animal comprises a sensing assembly including (i) a skin temperature sensor positioned such that a sensing surface of the skin temperature sensor faces the animal, the skin temperature sensor configured to produce a skin temperature output, (ii) an ambient temperature sensor spaced away from the animal and configured to produce an ambient temperature output, and (iii) an accelerometer for sensing an acceleration of the pet animal and producing an acceleration output; and a processor for receiving the outputs, calculating an activity level from the acceleration data and determining whether the core temperature of the pet animal is within the normal range based on a pre-defined function relating the skin temperature T.sub.S, the ambient temperature T.sub.A, and the activity level of the pet animal.

A system and method for monitoring the health of an animal using multiple sensors is described. The wearable device may include one or more sensors whose resultant signal levels may be analyzed in the wearable device or uploaded to a data management server for additional analysis. One or more embodiments include variations of the UWB system to accommodate differences in animals, such as scheduling or attempting transmissions between the wearable device and the data management server in such a way as to increase the likelihood of a successful transmission.

A method, device and system are provided for remotely monitoring one or more parameters associated with a grazing animal. The method comprises the steps of: mounting a collar comprising sensor onto a grazing animal; detecting by said sensor movements of the grazing animal or lack thereof; classifying the detected movements into a group of pre-defined activity classes; and based detected movements and their classification into at least one of the pre-defined activity classes, determining at least one of the parameters being monitored.

Techniques are described for determining cognitive impairment, an example of which includes accessing a set of epochs of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data of responses of a brain of a test patient to a plurality of auditory stimulus events; processing the set of epochs to identify parameter values one or more of which is based on information from the individual epochs without averaging or otherwise collapsing the epoch data. The parameter values are input into a model that is trained based on the parameters to determine whether the test patient is cognitively impaired.

A system for three-dimensional animal tracking in laboratory conditions is proposed. A mobile device that has one infrared and one ultrasonic sensor, equipped with memory and/or radio transmitter, is attached to a moving creature. One compact stationary box is placed in the vicinity; it emits a pre-determined sequence of short infrared pulses, short ultrasonic signals and two planar, radially emitted light beams that move through the area of interest with constant angular speed in two orthogonal directions. The mobile device receives two angular coordinates in the form of two time intervals between an infrared pulse and the next two orthogonal planar beam receptions, and it receives one linear coordinate in the form of the time interval between an infrared pulse and the next ultrasonic signal reception, taking into account the speed of sound in the air. The ultrasonic emitter is driven by a pulse-width modulated signal to make it undetectable by animals.

A dual modality imaging apparatus, comprising a magnetic resonance imaging (=MRI) system and a fluorescence molecular tomography (=FMT) system, for investigating a sample (42) located at a sample position (10), wherein the MRI system comprises a magnet (9) with a room temperature bore (8), with the sample position (10) located within the bore (8), and wherein the FMT system comprises means for directing a light beam (12, 17; 30) towards the sample position (10), and a position-sensitive detector (37) for collecting fluorescence light from the sample (42), is characterized in that the position-sensitive detector (37) is located within the bore (8), wherein at least part of the sample (42) is imaged onto the position-sensitive detector (37), and that the means for directing the light beam (12, 17; 30) comprise a focusing device for focusing the light beam (12, 17; 30) into a focal spot (41) on the sample (42), and a scanning device for scanning the focal spot (41) on the sample (42). The apparatus is simple in design and versatile in application, and in particular imposes less limitations on the maximum number of source/detector pairs during FMT imaging, thus allowing a better FMT image resolution.

A degree-of-health outputting device is provided with a display unit, an operating unit, and an output unit. The display unit displays a captured image of a region, the state of which changes according to a degree of health in a living body, and displays a plurality of comparison images having different degrees of health obtained on the basis of a reference image of the region captured prior to the time the abovementioned captured image was acquired for the same living body. The operating unit is provided in order to select one of the plurality of comparison images displayed by the display unit. The output unit (e.g., the display unit) outputs (e.g., displays) information relating to the degree of health of the living body on the basis of the comparison image selected through use of the operating unit.

A system for providing optical actuation and optical sensing can include an optical coherence tomography (OCT) device that performs optical imaging of a sample based on optical interferometry from an optical sampling beam interacting with an optical sample and an optical reference beam; an OCT light source to provide an OCT imaging beam into the OCT device which splits the OCT imaging beam into the optical sampling beam and the optical reference beam; and a light source that produces an optical actuation beam comprising a plurality of wavelengths that is coupled along with the optical sampling beam to be directed to the sample to actuate particles or structures in the sample so that the optical imaging captures information of the sample under the optical actuation.