BarTender: A system for recording intakes and body weights in ingestive behavior experiments

Abstract

A system is described for the semi-automated collection of fluid bottle, food jar, and rodent body weights. Items are labeled with barcodes, which are scanned by a Macintosh application connected via USB to a scale. Body weights are collected in the animal room by an iPad application connected to a Bluetooth scale. Simple summary statistics are automatically calculated, and data are stored with experiment metadata in a cloud database. Up-to-date graphs of the data are rendered by a web application from any browser, from which data can be downloaded for further analysis. Such a system makes ingestive behavior experiments more accurate, rapid, and higher throughput.