With their research on “Ultrasound Monitoring for Ultra Refined Animal Experiments (‘UltraEx’) they submitted a proposal for the 2021 Holland High Tech competition.
The project aims to precisely localize ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) of rodents in a social context. This means that you cannot only detect that a USV is made, but also which animal makes it. Knowing which animal produces the call helps you to determine the emotional state of specific individuals. This is achieved by a combination of a high-density microphone array, embedded computing and AI programming. The information gained by this innovative real-time approach can help to better understand social interaction and communication between animal models of neurodevelopmental conditions. It can also improve the animal well-being during the experiments and thereby also the quality of the gained data. In addition, this approach is following the 3R principles (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement) for animal research and could help to reduce the number of animals in research.
Holland High Tech organizes the programming of joint research by companies and research institutions in the Dutch high-tech sector. The annual competition awards the best R&D proposals for Public-Private-Partnerships (PPP) that offer solutions for the social themes and missions of the Netherlands.
By winning the prize, Judith Homberg (Radboudumc), Lucas Noldus (Noldus Information Technology) and their partner Bernhard Englitz (Radboud University) obtain 35.000€ seed funding for developing the prototype of their innovation.
Congratulation to both of you for this achievement. We are happy to have you on board!
As part of the “Horizon 2020” programme, the European Commission is funding the five-year CANDY research project with a total of six million Euro under grant agreement No. 847818.