Many diseases cause disruption in the patient's natural daily rhythms and affect activities such as eating and sleeping. Rectifying these rhythms can be the key to preventing and reversing these diseases. One way to further this knowledge is by researching the impact of these rhythms on the risk of diseases. Scaling this down, we can observe and control this phenomenon in fruit flies. Salk Institute for Biological Studies has been working to accomplish this and has invested in prototypes to monitor and feed the fruit flies.
The previous iteration of this progress successfully presented a housing for the flies and developed a feeding mechanism that accommodated the older flies. However, the previous project lacked a software system for monitoring and tracking the fruit flies in the enclosure. A monitoring system would allow researchers to develop more accurate data about the flies and their activity patterns. This insight would be a tremendous development in disease research.
Our client would like our team to accelerate this research by developing an automated system to monitor activity and food intake in fruit flies of all ages. In the system, a housing area will be separated from the feeding area by servo valves. The flies will be drawn to the desired location through the use of blue LED lights. In the feeding area, a capillary tube is filled with a liquid food in which the flies must climb up to consume the food. The system will be monitored with a motion detecting camera to track the activities of the fruit flies and data on the flies will be stored on a server.