Development of compouterized systems for processing and analysing the low frequencey biological time series.

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Animal behaviors are rhythmic with periods ranging from hours to years. Recently, not only in the basic biology but in the applied field such as medicine. pharmacology, and agriculture, there is an increased number of researchers on the mechanism of these rhythmicities.For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, they started checking the effect of drug on the periodic behavior. In psychiatry, attention is now paid to the periodic behavior much more than ever, since some psychiatric or emotional disorders were found to be accompanied with abnormal rhythmicity in behaviors.In the study of biological rhythms, a huge amount of time series data has to be analyzed. This has been embarrassing the researcher. To relieve them from such trouble, it has been required to develop a inexpensive system that records, processes, and analyzes the biological time series and is easy to handle.In order to meet such a requirement, we organized the study team to develop the compact computerized system. By holding frequent meetings, we investigated problems which the researcher has been encountering and, eventually, developed the two alternative sets of system as follows, so that the desire of researchers may be satisfied as much as possible.(1) A system having 128 channels, which may be convenient in measuring many animals simultanously in a large laboratory.(2) A system with a restricted number (6) of channels, easier to handle for a small laboratory and for a beginner such as a high school student.Utility of these systems has already been demonstrated. Now we are ready to manufacture them in cooperation with two industrial companies, Japan System and Iwasaki Tsushinki.