Diet - Food / Liquid Consumption

The Diet system provides nutrition researchers with the ability to precisely monitor food and liquid consumption by weighing the food/liquid reservoirs continuously. Each system consists of the Fusion Software and at least one Fusion Node to which up to 24 stations (weight scales) can be connected . The system is a great tool to measure meal pattern analysis (meal size, meal frequency, duration and meal percentage) in studies involving diet induced obesity, satiation and even for temporomandibular joint model.

The weight information of each station is organized into food and liquid consumption. Each food or liquid reservoir is placed on a sensitive balance and introduced to the animal via specially designed cages. The cages are designed to permit animals’ ready access to the reservoir while preventing spillage or other loss.

Consumption data is analyzed to Create Meal Patterns and/or Diet Preference. The Parameters for Meal Pattern Analysis can be changed in the Diet Settings via Fusion Software.

In addition, the system is capable of performing self-diagnostic and display the status of each station (operational or not). Data is generated at intervals of 1 minute to 9999 hours and identifies the consumption for each animal.

The Diet System can be combined with the Open Field and Metabolic Monitors to create a more comprehensive behavior study.

The Diet System can be used in many cage modes. Each cage can have up to four stations (scales) that can be used for food or liquid monitoring, (all food, all liquid or half for food and half for liquid). Custom cages available for collecting urine and feces output.

The Fusion DietID system goes one step beyond the standard Fusion Diet system, giving researchers the ability to house multiple animals per Cage . Each Cage may contain up to 24 separate animals with embedded passive RFID's creating the potential for monitoring up to 576 animals simultaneously. Consumption data is maintained for every animal during each sample – thus revealing how food consumption is affected by animal interaction and dominant animal behavior.

This opens doors to a wide variety of new experiments that explore animal behavior in more realistic, non-isolated environments while maintaining the accuracy of single animal systems.
Entirely self-maintained environments may be constructed to conduct long-term experiments on groups of animals to monitor individual behavior and interaction between test and control groups.

Scale readings and ID readings are shown on alternating channels, and these pairs may be grouped into 1, 2, 3 or 4 scales per cage.