Firstly, although it is very flexible and powerful, it is also very easy to use. I have to constantly train new users, many of whom have little or no computer literacy and who have no experience doing behavioral experiments at all. I find that most people can get up and running in under 2 hrs. It took most people longer than that to learn what to do to set up for filming in the bad old days before tracking software !

I also have to deal with multiple strains, ages, sexes, species, sizes etc of my rodent subjects, but it is really easy to set Viewer up for each new condition and test. The tracking is very robust, even in conditions that are really less than ideal. I have, for example, one user who had films of mice tested in an “open field” (a rat cage) in the hood in a barrier room. It would have been a total nightmare to try to get grid crosses on those, and I really thought I wouldn’t get any tracking, but it worked great.

Another user came to me wanting to track a startle response in fish. These were also already filmed, and in terrible lighting conditions. The people at BIOBSERVE spent a lot of time working out configurations and settings that would make this work and it saved us untold hours of trying to do this by hand, frame by frame. Actually, they were a lot more patient than me. Keep in mind, I already owned my licenses for a long time and they had nothing to gain from this.

I also have to do most of the standard tests – open field, spontaneous alternation, elevated plus maze, water maze etc. and Viewer really saves me a lot of time and errors in those assays. Training novice users to score multiple things at once (like in the EPM) is otherwise pretty difficult and requires a lot of practice. It also lets me multitask – I can run animals in an open field while I do the others in the balance beam, for example, or run more than one animal at a time in the open field.

The company is also responsive to requests for innovation and is really ingenious in the way it approaches non-traditional behavioral testing.

Finally - as cool as this is, it is a scientific tool so it has to be reliable and valid. These guys really know the behavior behind the tests and take the science seriously."