Measuring Behavior

Mar 21, 2025 | In the Community, OpenBehavior Team Update, Uncategorized

Measuring Behavior

This week, we continue our exploration of the impact of open-source tools in neuroscience, following our recent report on data analysis tools (DeepLabCut, SLEAP, SimBA, BORIS, Fastmap, Brainways, Wholebrain, BPod, and SipperViz). You can find that summary here.

Now, we turn our attention to open-source devices designed for measuring behavior. Our analysis of project popularity, based on both the number of projects we’ve featured and the website traffic they’ve generated, highlights the significant influence of these tools in the field. The word cloud above visually represents the website traffic for these projects.

The Two-Armed Bandit (TAB) setup (December 6, 2024) has received the most attention, maintaining popularity since its initial posting in April 2021. Read more about it here.

BPod, one of our earliest projects (July 2017) and still actively developed, is another highly influential tool in this category. Details about BPod are available here.

Three additional projects exemplify the innovative potential of shared open-source designs:

  1. Lickometer from Meaghan Creed’s Lab:
    • The original design, posted on Hackaday, gained significant traction.
    • We featured it in May 2018, as described here.
    • An updated version was subsequently published in eNeuro (2019).
    • Related designs by Jude Frie and Jibran Khokhar, published in HardwareX (2019), further expanded on this work, as described here.
    • These tools provide versatile solutions for measuring fluid choice behavior in home cages.
  2. Dual-Port Lick Detector (Bilal Hyder’s Lab):
    • Developed by Brice Williams and Anderson Speed and published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, this device, featured in January 2019 (here), is notable for head-fixed preparations.
    • Its sustained high website traffic indicates its widespread adoption in labs studying reward-guided choice.
  3. OpenVape (Jude Frie and Jibran Khokhar):
    • This novel device for vaporized drug delivery, posted in May 2021, demonstrates the innovative applications of open-source hardware. You can read about OpenVape here.

These examples represent just a fraction of the impactful open-source tools available for measuring behavior in neuroscience. You can explore more of these devices in the Measurement category of our database: LINK.