Community call for home cage monitoring of lab animal behaviour

The COST Action CA20135 TEATIME has brought together animal research professionals from across Europe to discuss the development of novel technologies that enable the 24/7 collection of data from animals in their home cages.

In this editorial, the group outlines the potential this emerging field of continuous, automated behaviour recording for at least several days has for the improvement of biomedical research and animal welfare. They also describe the logistical challenge involved and the barriers to overcome to move the field towards wide-spread implementation.

Encouraging and enabling collaboration between animal researchers and the computer science community is a key issue, as well as the lack of unified data / metadata formats or existing reference data sets. Another issue is the lack of infrastructure supporting the deposition and providing open access to the large home-cage monitoring datasets. The group came up with several suggestions for tackling the problem and conclude with individualised calls to action directed at different stakeholders.

Original publication:
COST Action TEATIME CA20135 welfare group; Advocating for automation in animal research: using home cage monitoring to advance welfare, reproducibility and scientific openness. Dis Model Mech 1 October 2025; 18 (10): dmm052669. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.052669.