Crayfish heart rate monitoring with an accelerometer

Antonin Novak (1) , Petr Císař (2)

1 LAUM - Laboratoire d'Acoustique de l'Université du Mans
2 ICS - Institute of Complex Systems [University of South Bohemia]

Crayfish are widely used as a bioindicator of water pollution levels and as a model organism to study environmental changes. Existing non-invasive systems for water pollution detection using the crayfish use the optical principle of heart rate monitoring. The aim of this study is to develop an alternative method to crayfish heart rate monitoring which solves the problems associated with the current methods. The introduced solution is based on the use of crayfish vibration measurement using an accelerometer. The method enables us to determine the heart rate and provide a quantitively similar signal to the existing systems. The advantage of this method is the direct detection of crayfish locomotor activity from a signal measured by one sensor only; optical sensors require an additional sensor for crayfish motion detection. The method is an alternative to the existing methods for water pollution detection and ethological experiments.

Mots clés: Vibration; Bioindicator; Water pollution; Heartbeat; Crayfish; Accelerometer

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Antonin Novak, Petr Císař. Crayfish heart rate monitoring with an accelerometer. Ecological Indicators, 2020, 111, pp.105993. ⟨10.1016/j.ecolind.2019.105993⟩. ⟨hal-02504501⟩