High-Volume Parallel Mouse Vital-Sign Monitoring With Near-Field Coherent Sensing

Mouse vital signs, such as the heartbeat and respiration rates, are critical observables for the current biomedical and pharmaceutical research works. The number of mice going through the measurement pipeline often needs to be massive to derive statistically significant correlation. However, present mouse vital-sign monitoring methods require substantial individual handling and have limited throughput per setup. In this letter, we demonstrate, for the first time, a parallel mouse vital-sign reading system, which can simultaneously retrieve the respiration and heartbeat rates for multiple mice in individual chambers with minimal noninvasive handling. The cardio signal quality is high enough to estimate the stress states by the heart rate variation analyses. Our system utilizes the multiplexed radio frequency signal around 1.8 GHz to detect the vital signs by near-field coherent sensing. The cross-chamber interference is minimized by the locality of near fields, frequency division, and radar-absorbing materials. The isolation can be readily done for more than 20 dB within a compact system volume. Our scalable design clearly shows how to achieve a high-throughput system for mouse vital-sign monitoring.