Telemetry - Science method

John Hatzopoulos Thank you! Exiftool has a bit of steep learning curve as the conversion to GPX is done through terminal. But this application is excellent!

@all When it comes to VHF receivers for telemetry projects, there are a few companies that are known for producing reliable equipment. While the availability of specific models can change over time, here are a few reputable manufacturers to consider:

It's important to note that availability and specific features may vary among manufacturers and their product lines. It's advisable to reach out to the manufacturers directly or consult with other researchers in your field to gather the most up-to-date information on the current offerings and determine which VHF receiver best suits your project requirements.

Ahmad - thanks for the suggestions. These are excellent reminders of overall surveying best practices that are good to consider. I don't think I've ever seen an incentivized in-app survey. But I have seen it suggested before and may give it some thought. Re: the tools/platforms, the ones you listed either take the user away from the in-app experience or are implemented thru iframe which can have some disadvantages. The platform we are using (Refiner) is purpose built for pretty seamless integration thru javascript. There are other, similar options available, too.

thanks again.

There have been several studies that have investigated the relationship between the implementation of bedside mobility assessment tools and length of stay in acute care hospitals.

One study published in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing in 2018 found that the use of a bedside mobility assessment tool was associated with a shorter length of stay for older patients in a telemetry unit. The study, which was conducted at an acute care hospital in Canada, found that patients who received mobility assessments had a length of stay that was an average of 2.3 days shorter than patients who did not receive assessments.

Another study published in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing in 2016 investigated the impact of a bedside mobility assessment program on length of stay in a telemetry unit at a hospital in the United States. The study found that the implementation of the program was associated with a shorter length of stay for older patients, with an average reduction of 2.5 days compared to patients who did not receive the assessments.

These studies suggest that the implementation of bedside mobility assessment tools may be associated with shorter length of stay for older patients in telemetry units at acute care hospitals. It is worth noting that the specific impact of such tools on length of stay may vary depending on the specific population being studied and the specific hospital setting.

We used (and still do) the Biotrack SIKA. We are really happy with these (same as the LOTEK, but you will only be able to buy the SIKA in Germany).

I recommend to use a good quality receiver, which are all more or less the same price. Any low-budget solution is not worth the money!

Never forget: you need good antennas, the antenna (and the cable) is your true receiver (pure physics)!

You also just may call me in the institute!

Hi Ritika,

The easiest way of interfacing a computer with an Arduino is using the "USART" communications with RX and TX connections in Asynchronous mode. These are then connected to a USB "virtual com port" (serial port) device with logic level IOs. These can be purchased very cheaply as modules, or you can uses one of the ICs from FTDI. Although I see many arduinos already have this interface on them. Have a look for "Arduino serial port".

Manipulation of the data can then be done with, visual basic, python, gambas etc.

Hi Silue Dozohoua Check https://space.mit.edu/RADIO/CST_online/mergedProjects/3D/common_tools/common_tools_biomodels.htm

I do agree with Mazher

I have not used this receiver, because it is not my field, but I have used direction-finding radio in a very different application (with custom equipment).

One question you might consider is the bandwidth of the transmitted telemetry signal versus the bandwidth of the receiver. A narrow band telemetry signal received on a wide-band receiver will give low volume.

Based on the information from the SpaceX Twitter account can be concluded that on board Falcon9 will be used Starlink communication antenna as well.

Article Habitat selection guiding agri‐environment schemes for a far...

Hi Fridolin, Here is a nice paper on the topic out of Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. They looked at how GPS-collared wolf space-use changed in response to human howls. Hope that helps if you have not seen this already!

After some additional searching, I've found the "speedfilter" function in the new (April 2019) "trip" package to work well. More info here:

follow

Hi Renaud and Natalia, Thank you very much for your suggestions! We ultimately decided on telemetry based measurements.

This might be of interest to you then Arturo Martínez Perona

Although I'm not sure if the project is still running

I'm not sure about telemetry but there are chronic implantable O₂ sensors for the OxyLite system that might work for you.

Is Brett's choice of system giving you trouble?

Hi Maria,

Have you thought about making your own collars? If you you can find a radio-transmitter collar suitable for rhinos it is possible to attach a satellite-download (Globalstar network) GPS receiver that works really well. Details about the hardware can be found in this paper:

“An inexpensive satellite-download GPS receiver for wildlife: Field trial on black swans”

January 2017Wildlife Research 44(7)

DOI10.1071/WR17064

I’ve made similar devices for deer and pigs - really not that difficult. Email me at movement.ecology@gmail.com if you want further details.

Than kyou Dimitar Spirrov

There are quite a lot available from Linear Tech, this page allows you to select by parameters, I've included shutdown current and set a max of 1uA:

I would say telemetry is for sure better

you can develop a testbed which follow the architecture in the following paper

Hi Chloe

i agree that probably the most sensible component is the battery. most devices use lithium batteries, and they tend to fail in in low temp. But, i think that the issue might be less problematic than you expect fro two reasons: micro-climate and fox behavior. when you attach the collar to the fox neck, it is partially heated from the body of the animal and protected from wind by its fur. this may buffer some of the lower temp. second, since foxes themselves benefit from saving energy on thermo regulation by avoiding exterem condition, your devices might experience less of these freezing conditions.

Finally, even if the tag will eventually fail (due to temps or any other reason), remote download will minimize data losses. Since a short tracking effort will allow you to detect den location(s) for your tracked individuals, using a unit that has remote download will ensure that at least most of the data is secured. Wifi options are usually very energy consuming, and i would recommend a UHF or VHF downloading to a base-station placed in these frequently visited sites.  we had good experience with Eobs telemetry, Germany (see also some other answers i wrote here in RG). i think they are much cheaper that Telemetry solutions, but i havent checked lately. Other options are also worth exploring (e.g. Technosmart Itally have BT remote download that might work for your system, and they are also fairly cheap).

cheers

Orr 

HI,

I suggest using optical detection using a LED light source / photo detector such as the OSRAM 7050 ($0.75).  It can be digitally controlled using a TI AFE 4404 ($2.65), or driven using analog circuits.  The TI AFE 4044 may be driven using an I2C interface, for example from an Arduino for prototype.  Smaller systems may be developed using microcontrollers such as the NRF51822 from Nordic Semiconductor (or other similar microcontrollers that include BlueTooth LE) if you need the rat to be mobile.

Shave the rat.  Adhere the 7050 to the skin surface.  Set the Green LED to illuminate for about 100 uS every 1 ms.  You could use also the IR and the Red LED, but green seems to provide the best pulsatile information.   Read the output of the photodetector near the middle of the 100 us.  The little bumps are pulses.  Take the first derivative of the data and the bumps are larger & easier to detect.

This works on people with white and dark skin, not sure about rats.  

The TI AFE 4044 has an evaluation module that is $199.  

Alternately, you can build a basic ECG circuit using an instrumentation amplifier, or a "real" system using something like a TI ADS 1291.  As with the AFE 4044, there is an evaluation module available for $199.

Telemetry is a subsystem of ambulatory care systems. It can prevent hospitalization by providing a continuous preventive care and equally extends medical support to patient outside the hospital wards.

Have you considered one of the infrared thermometers used to measure ear temperature in humans - possibly it could be used to measure ear or oral temperature in the mice, if the can be handled?  Alternatively, perhaps there are data correlating core temperature with body surface temperature as measured using an infrared camera (or at key locations on the body surface using an infrared thermometer?) This would involve little or no handling of the mice, which could alter body core temperature.

Hi Daniel,

here is an open source paper that deals with "tag predation".

"[...] we tagged eight silver eels with miniature satellite pop-up tags during their migration from the St. Lawrence River in Québec, Canada. Surprisingly, of the seven tags that successfully transmitted archived data, six were ingested by warm-gutted predators, as observed by a sudden increase in water temperature. Gut temperatures were in the range of 20 to 25°C—too cold for marine mammals but within the range of endothermic fish. [...]"

Cheers to Karlstad!

Flo

Without having gone through all of the suggested studies above: For some fish species in aquaculture evacuation speed has been examined since it is closely related to appetite. It is though slightly different for fish in culture since their feed is more "efficient" than wild prey. The evacuation rate is dependent on temperature and fish size (and type of fish) and In a report I have the author (Alanärä 2002, pelletologi - läran om fiskens foder) combined data from two earlier studies (Ruhonen 1994 (Gastrointestinal responses of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) to dry pellet and low-fat herring diets: consequences for growth, feed utilisation and nutrient load into the water. PhD-thesis) and Grove et al 1978 (Satiation amount, frequency of feeding and gastric emptying rate in Salmo gairdneri. J. Fish Biol.,5: 507-516.) and constructed an equation to calculate evacuation rate for Rainbow trout that has not been published in any reviewed paper unfortunately. The model is based on rather few data points but might give a hint on what you are after. If you are interested I can send you the report. Good luck!

Hi Niall, See this publication - if you haven't already - it should provide you with a pretty good start on transmitter effects on swimming performance and a universal method to evaluate transmitter effects on juvenile salmon across populations, transmitter types, and other fishes.

Cheers,

JP

1) How can CVM experts diagnose definitively if the patients have MI, CVM or even arrhythmia maladies considering

Universal definition of myocardial infarction

Detection of rise and/or fall of cardiac biomarker values (preferably troponin) with at least one value above the 99th percentile of the upper reference limit and with at least one of the following:

Symptoms of ischaemia;

New or presumably new significant ST-T changes or new LBBB; Development of pathological Q waves in the ECG;

Imaging evidence of new loss of viable myocardium, or new regional wall motion abnormality;

Identification of an intracoronary thrombus by angiography or autopsy.

Cardiac death with symptoms suggestive of myocardial ischaemia, and presumably new ECG changes or new LBBB, but death occurring before blood cardiac biomarkers values are released or before cardiac biomarker values would be increased.

Stent thrombosis associated with MI when detected by coronary angiography or autopsy in the setting of myocardial ischaemia and with a rise and/or fall of cardiac biomarker values with at least one value above the 99th percentile URL.

You ask medical history: for typical angina, for history of coronary diseases, is patient in high risk (Diabetes, hypertension, age, male, se cholesterol, LDL, HDL, Triglicerid).

You can measure serial of Troponins for decetect is there any change

You can do echo for wal motion

even you can do coronaro angiography 

If you think about a

Hi,

I will have to make several assumptions because not enough information is provided to be sure.  For example, no indication is given as to the particular locations of the remaining electrodes that were attached in the two cases where 2 electrodes came off.   It isn't stated if different electrodes came off in the two cases.  Did the pain reported by the patient occur only during times the electrodes were off?  

A cardiologist can determine if there are heart issues based on a single Lead, (e.g., Lead I, Lead II, Lead III).  In fact, there are 3-electrode monitoring systems.  Typically, an issue is seen using a 3- or 5-electrode system and the cardiologist wants to isolate the location of the issue, then a 12-lead ECG may be ordered.   Some cardiac arrhythmias, such as periodic ectopic beats may not warrant an 12-lead ECG.

Based on the information you provided, the system is using the IEC electrode coloring convention, not the AAMI convention (typically used in USA). see http://intl.welchallyn.com/documents/Cardiopulmonary/Electrocardiographs/CP100/2007_11_12_ElectrodePlacementPoster.pdf

Some background: By convention, the right-leg  electrode is the "reference electrode"   All measurements are made relative to this common reference.  e.g. Left-arm - right leg; right-arm - right leg, left-leg - right leg.  chest - right-leg.  For many systems if the right-leg electrode is removed all monitoring stops.  (Other systems can move the reference electrode location in the event the right-leg electrode is removed, but that is outside the scope of this response).  From these electrode measurements, standard Leads (e.g. Lead II = (right arm - right leg) - (left leg - right leg) = right-arm - left leg) are calculated.  

If we assume that the telemetry system used stops monitoring when the right-leg electrode is removed, but would continue measuring Lead II (if for example the left-arm electrode and chest electrode were removed, we can understand that the the most import single electrode is the one on the right leg.

Since it is not stated what electrodes came off:   Assuming the chest (V-lead) electrode came off and one of left-leg, right-arm, left-arm, then the system would still be able to derive one valid Lead (Lead I, Lead III, Lead II, respectively).  On the other hand, if the chest electrode remained on and two of the three electrodes from left-leg, right-arm, left-arm were removed, then the system cannot generate a standard Lead: none of Lead I, II, III can be generated.  With a chest electrode, and the two leg electrodes connected, for example, a vector from the chest electrode to the left-leg could in theory be calculated, but that is not a standard Lead.  The V-lead is typically used to make measurements of ST-segment elevation, but this can be measured with only a few heartbeats.  Note diagnostic ECG systems typically take a 10-second sample that might be as few as 5 or 6 heartbeats.

Yes, we may consider it bad form for a clinician to walk off leaving an unanswered question from a patient.

Without seeing the ECG waveforms, the question of the correct diagnosis can't be answered.

41 hours of ECG monitoring is often enough to detect any issues. Again, without knowing the patient history and seeing the ECG waveforms, one can't decide if 41 hours were sufficient.  IF the chest pain complaints occurred during at least part of the time when all electrodes were attached and/or if the chest electrode was one of the electrodes that detached, then we would know a valid Lead was measured during the complaint.  In that case, the missing data seems relatively unimportant.

All electrodes contribute to building various clinical Leads (ECG traces), but not all electrodes must be connected to have at least on valid ECG trace. 

Soil grids for the whole world.

There is currently no review that covers all seabird species across countries in the north-east Atlantic (i.e. north-west Europe). Most countries have published national ringing atlases, that's probably the best way to get an overview. Iceland is a notable exception. EURING is currently planning a joint atlas of ringing recoveries throughout Europe, but I guess it will be a few years before this is out.

My pleasure.

Good luck.

Dear Lingyun, it sound like very interesting application. I believe it is doable. I have heard about similar applications, but can't remember the source. Now I found this, for example - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3820959/

I doubt if RFID tags would work for the hornets. The transponders attached to the bees were tracked by positioning an RFID scanner at the hive entrance and at a feeding station, to which the bees were trained.

I'm having the same trouble in trying to determine the hunting distance of Cerceris wasps that nest in the ground and prey on buprestid beetles in the tree canopy.  Harmonic radar isn't an option because it requires flight over open terrain (signals are lost in flight through vegetation). Radiotelemetry won't work because the antenna on the transmitter would affect entry and maneuverabilty in the nest.  I am also looking for ideas.

I have always used Holohil (Canadian), www.holohil.com. Excellent service and reliable devices. I you give them a call they will provide sound advice and find a solution for you.

Sue,

Sometimes in some species, correlation was found between sex and serum sexual hormones levels. However, it should be determined. Laprascopy would be another non-invasive method for sex determination, especially in sturgeons. However, as I know, it is not reliable in all stage of spawning. The fish should have some gonad development.

Umar:

Perhaps, the paper I reference you below (which uses "ultrasonic telemetry" in fishes, can be of interest for your research problem.

"The ultrasonic telemetry of cardiac rhythms of wild brown trout (Salmo trutta L.) as an indicator of bio-energetics and behaviour"; by:  I. G. Priede† andA. H. Young.

Journal of Fish Biology,  Volume 10, Issue 4, pages 299–318, April 1977

Antonio

I don't think you can do it, unless you know what is the proportion of animals you have telemetry data on. Otherwise, there is no information on resights of a sample of tagged animals on the proportion of untagged animals, and hence you can't get density/abundance. At best, if you have a large and representative sample of animals for which you have telemetry, you can construct a RELATIVE density surface, which essentially would represent habitat use (assuming you get locations  independently of habitat, which might or not be true!). But you have no information on the telemetry data alone to inform about the height of said function. I believe the references provided by @Rishi Kumar Sharma are only useful if you have BOTH telemetry data and additional information (e.g. captures and recaptures of both telemetry and non telemetry animals), which is clear form the wording in the title ("....radiotelemetry and replicated mark-resight techniques..." and "....radiotelemetry and replicated mark-resight techniques...") 

The RTU with its highly sophisticated communication capabilities can also be used as a communication gateway. A gateway essentially changes one communications protocol to another.

Typically at station level, there may be many communications protocols employed ranging from IEC60870-5-103,SPABUS and the new IEC61850 standard.

The RTU560 when functioning as a gateway will convert station protocols to network protocols and vice versa.

Shifting of centralized communication functions to station level utilizes the available bandwidth more efficiently and reduces the required communication lines at the same time.

The RTU supports many of the international and third party telecontrol mmunications protocols.

Due to the standardized internal interface for system and process information, the integration of a new protocol is easily achieved.

The RTU560 is able to communicate with different hierarchical levels of a network control system.

At station level, the RTU can communicate with sub RTU's or with any other intelligent electronic devices (IED's).

The RTU time management system synchronizes the RTU with the supplied absolute time with a high degree of accuracy. The absolute accuracy is mainly provided by the source for synchronization used,whereby GPS,DCF 77 and IRIG-B allow an accuracy of 5 ms and better.

The RTU architecture is totally distributed both in hardware software and ommunications interfaces.Software applications can be distributed over a number of different communications units (CMU Boards).

This is possible due to an internal communication concept that keeps all CMU boards informed about the contents of the process data interface.

There is one process and system database which is available in adapted copies for each CMU board.

The internal communication system ensures that all process data is consistent.

The different CMU boards run the communication tasks for the connected serial links.

This allows the type and number of different communication links running on one CMU board to be defined.

System performance is defined by the configuration of the CMU boards.

This is the dynamic tracking platform mechanism:

Hi everybody,

the main difficulty is that the thickness of the neck and the head are very similar, for that is easy for mink slip off the radio-collars. Also,minks are so flexibles, and the material of a harness needs to be very strong for avoiding that the mink chews. I'll be grateful if you can send me the publication when it will be available.

Best,

Simon

Good question. Several obstacles to widespread adoption come to my mind:

[1] Studies using specialized telemetry (heart-rate, microphone, etc.) have difficulty--at this time, at least--making the link between mechanisms and the kind of large-scale ecological processes that many are interested in (e.g patterns of selection, population viability, etc.). Many telemetry solutions, such as transmitters used for simple location data, are probably the exception since they can allow researchers to be informed about dispersal patterns or juvenile survival, etc.

[2] A corollary of #1 is the cost of specialized transmitters, which fortunately continues to decrease. Studying some processes like selection demand large sample sizes; thus, the costs of doing business using specialized telemetry would be prohibitive.

[3] Large data: This is a strange obstacle, but I think we could argue that the presence of large data and the act of data mining has downplayed the importance of mechanistic studies (for which specialized telemetry could be used). I'm seeing more and more graduate students leaning on public data (previously published dataset in the public domain, species distributions) rather than focusing on empirical data collection from natural systems.

Anyway, I just whipped out these thoughts. I will be very interested in hearing more from others.

As mentioned before, drop off mechanisms are not 100% reliable.

When I was working on large mammal telemetry, we used pure cotton straps and integrate it into the collar's belt (additional to drop off mechanism) - just to make sure that the collar will get off the animal. Cotton will deteriorate depending on weather conditions. We used a Swedish "recipe" in Slovenia and it worked perfectly (we have similar moderate climate). For one year study period on an infant bear or deer we used one strap of 4 cm wide cotton, for adult female 2, and for adult male 3 straps.

it wouldn't be worth doing it without synchronising them, and even if you do so you could only get triangulations in very low complexity environments. Any rocks/boulders/coral cause acoustic shadows and echoes which will completely destroy the reliability of the triangulation. See welsh et al. (2012) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00338-012-0892-1

No problem. Thank you Bryan!