Rotation

LimeLight keeps track of the relative angle of the body — the line between the nose and tail. With this information, it is possible to count the number of times an animal rotates on its axis during the course of a trial. In the image below, the animal is rotating continuously in the clockwise direction. For display purposes, the trace is reset to 0 degrees every time the animal completes a 180-degree turn (red dots). When two consecutive 180-degree rotations in the same direction are detected within a set time period (in this case, 10 seconds), a rotation is counted. A total of 52 complete clockwise rotations occurred in this particular trial (lower image). The number of rotations in each direction for a complete set of trials can be calculated automatically and batch exported to a spreadsheet file.