Method of measuring efficacy of treatment for an autoimmune disease in vivarium animals

A method of measuring efficacy of a first treatment of an autoimmune disease in a study animal in a vivarium comprising the steps of:

• (a) placing the study animal in a cage free of electronic penetrations in the vivarium and enrolling the study animal in a study;
• (b) electronically observing one or more animal activities in real-time of the study animal using a combination of electronic cameras, infrared (IR) lighting of the study animals, and electronic hardware including computation and communication hardware;
• (c) selecting a single “activity-drop metric” from the set:
• {regression analysis, LASSO, RANSAC, Monte Carlo} with an associated scalar “activity-drop value”;
• (d) collecting a set of “nightly activity data” comprising values of the associated scalar activity drop value from electronically observing the study animal repeatedly and continually for a night;
• (e) identifying automatically three consecutive time regions in the nightly activity data:
• a “high-activity region,” an “activity-drop region,” and a “low-activity region;”
• (f) applying the activity-drop metric to the three consecutive regions, generating a nightly activity-drop value;
• (g) adding the nightly activity-drop value into an “animal health dataset,” wherein the animal health dataset comprises the resulting nightly activity-drop values;
• (h) iterating steps (b) through (g) for sequential nights until a terminating condition is reached;
• wherein the study animal is housed in a home cage in the vivarium;
• and
• wherein the collected data comprises the animal health dataset.
• wherein the efficacy of the first treatment is a comparison of the animal health dataset to a reference treatment for the autoimmune disease;
• (i) removing the study animal from the study when the terminating condition is reached.