Skip to Main Content
4,064
Views
6
CrossRef citations to date
Altmetric

Full Papers

A novel method to develop an animal model of depression using a small mobile robot

Pages 61-69
Received 10 Apr 2012
Accepted 15 Aug 2012
Published online: 29 Jan 2013
 
Translator disclaimer

Robotics is contributing to studies on animal behavior. Mobile robots are actually used as devices to give external stimulus to animals in several experiments. We consider that this approach can be applied to studies in psychic medicine. In psychic medicine, all new drugs are evaluated in experiments using animal models of mental disorder before using it in clinical practice. However, conventional animal models have some problems in the construct validity. The animal models should be developed through the method which is consistently associated with the theory of the mental disorders while many of conventional models had been developed by genetic manipulations or surgical operations on nerve system. We considered that a novel animal model could be developed by stress exposure using a small mobile robot. We then implemented this method to the experimental system which had been developed in our past study. An experiment was conducted using the system, and the method was then verified. Therefore, we conclude that the animal model of depression developed by proposed method, exposing continuous attack by the robot in immature period and interactive attack in mature period, can be a novel animal model of depression.

Graphical abstract

Acknowlegments

The experiment with animals has been approved by ethical committee for animal experiments in Waseda University. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21760207 and ‘High-Tech Research Center’ Project for Private Universities: matching fund subsidy from MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology). This works was also supported by GCOE; Global Robot Academia, ASMeW, and SolidWorks, Japan.

 

Related research

People also read lists articles that other readers of this article have read.

Recommended articles lists articles that we recommend and is powered by our AI driven recommendation engine.

Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.
Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab.