Near-Infrared Spectroscopy as a Tool for Marine Mammal Research and Care.
Developments in wearable human medical and sports health trackers has offered new solutions to challenges encountered by eco-physiologists attempting to measure physiological attributes in freely moving animals. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is one such solution that has potential as a powerful physio-logging tool to assess physiology in freely moving animals. NIRS is a non-invasive optics-based technology, that uses non-ionizing radiation to illuminate biological tissue and measures changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentrations inside tissues such as skin, muscle, and the brain. The overall footprint of the device is small enough to be deployed in wearable physio-logging devices. We show that changes in hemoglobin concentration can be recorded from bottlenose dolphins and gray seals with signal quality comparable to that achieved in human recordings. We further discuss functionality, benefits, and limitations of NIRS as a standard tool for animal care and wildlife tracking for the marine mammal research community.
Duke Scholars
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- 3208 Medical physiology
- 3101 Biochemistry and cell biology
- 1701 Psychology
- 1116 Medical Physiology
- 0606 Physiology
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- 3208 Medical physiology
- 3101 Biochemistry and cell biology
- 1701 Psychology
- 1116 Medical Physiology
- 0606 Physiology