Measuring social interaction becomes nowadays more and more important.
The reason is that changes in the social activity of animals is much more sensitive to the inner status of an animal than behaviors measured in other test situations.
Motivation is the main force for social interaction of an animal, but difficult to measure with conventional tests. Slightly differences in the health status of an animal often cause large changes of the motivation of an animal and therfore measurable changes in the social interaction behavior.

Measuring social behavior is a complex task. It is indispensable nessacary, that you know the orientation of an animal, the nose position and the tail position.
The example below shows what happens, if you use a system that only tracks the center of the animal, as competitive products do.

In both cases, the positions of the tracked points are the same. It is not possible to distinguish between these very different events based on a single tracking point because the orientation of the animal is missing.

The "Viewer" software knows the orientation of the animal so it can for example use the visual angle (and other suitable parameters based on the three-point-tracking) of an animal to measure an active approach.

Active & Passive contact
Sniffing behavior for example is defined by orientation of one animal with in sight of the corresponding animal. During this time the active animal moves its head by retaining the same position of its body. This behavior is counted by our software as an active contact. If only one animal is sniffing, the behavior of the other individual is counted as a passive contact.

Aggressive & Submissive behavior
If an animal shows agression, the body is moving much more but do not change that much in its position like the head, for example during biting. The submissive animal shows an avoiding behavior by moving away and looking away. With help of these definitions we score in addition to active and passive contacts agression behavior and submissive behavior.

Based on these three points and suitable parameters that can be configured to your individual needs, the 'Viewer' measures, analyzes and calculates various social interaction events.

Take a look at this user story to learn, how this software is used for a social interaction project.