# Wireless Power Transmission System for High-Throughput Behavioral Studies on Small Freely Moving Animal Subjects

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN · 2022 · $74,736

## Abstract

Project Summary
In behavioral neuroscience experiments on small freely moving animals, such as rodents, wireless cage systems
have been widely used to enable wireless and battery-free operation of wearable/implantable devices (WIDs)
attached to or implanted in the animal body. Typically, the neuroscience experiments need to run for extended
periods in large enough subject populations to enhance the quality and statistical validity of the experiment
results. Researchers need to transfer animals from their homecage to the experimental arena, one at a time,
and return the animals back to the homecage and eventually to the animal facility after the experiments. This
procedure is quite labor-intensive and inefficient for researchers, stressful for the animals, and costly. We have
developed a rack-mountable wireless cage system, called EHC system. The EHC system is a resonance-based
multi-coil inductive link system built around a standard-sized rodent homecage. Simultaneously operating
multiple EHC systems can increase the data throughput in each experiment section. However, the challenge to
do this is the severe cross-couplings among adjacent EHC systems, which would shift the system operating
parameters, particularly the transmitter resonance frequency, and deteriorate the power transfer efficiency of the
inductive link. The inductive link even enters the frequency-splitting zone when adjacent homecages are placed
closer than a certain threshold. And the splitted resonance frequency cannot be converged by tuning the
resonance capacitance. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-EHC system to empower the
simultaneous operation of an array of EHC units placed right next to each other in the standard rack by adding
resonant reactive shielding coils in between the adjacent EHC units and implementing triple-loop auto-tuning in
each EHC unit for high throughput experiments. The shielding coil will reduce the undesired mutual coupling
between adjacent EHC units to a certain threshold that the triple-loop auto-tuning technique can adjust each
EHC unit at its optimal wireless power transmission condition on a continuous basis and over an extended period
with minimal operator involvement.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10451284
- **Project number:** 1R03NS124038-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
- **Principal Investigator:** Yaoyao Jia
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $74,736
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-03-01 → 2024-02-29

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10451284

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10451284, Wireless Power Transmission System for High-Throughput Behavioral Studies on Small Freely Moving Animal Subjects (1R03NS124038-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10451284. Licensed CC0.

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