From Continuous Monitoring to Actionable Events: Introducing the ActualHCA Event Monitoring Tool

Continuous home-cage monitoring has transformed the scope of behavioural research.

Rather than relying solely on brief observation periods or isolated behavioural tests, ActualHCA provides continuous 24/7 monitoring of socially housed animals within their home-cage environment. This enables the collection of objective behavioural and physiological data over extended periods, helping researchers identify subtle trends and patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.

This approach is particularly valuable during the dark phase, when animals are most active and opportunities for direct observation are limited.

With the release of ActualHCA Capture 3.1.0 and the new ActualHCA Event Monitoring Tool 1.0.0, researchers can take their studies a step further. Beyond collecting continuous behavioural and physiological data, these latest updates support the identification and monitoring of meaningful events as they occur — helping researchers focus on the moments that matter most.

The challenge: finding the moments that matter

Continuous monitoring generates rich and highly detailed datasets. However, with so much data being captured, a key challenge emerges: how can researchers quickly and efficiently identify the most important events?

Important behavioural or welfare-related changes may occur outside normal working hours, during the dark phase, or at isolated time points across a study. Reviewing long recordings manually can be time-consuming, and waiting until the end of a study may delay the point at which researchers can respond to emerging patterns.

The new ActualHCA Event Monitoring Tool has been designed to help close that gap — transforming continuous data into actionable insight by automatically highlighting key moments as they occur.

Introducing the ActualHCA Event Monitoring Tool

The ActualHCA Event Monitoring Tool automatically identifies when behaviour and/or temperature data move outside user-defined ranges, helping researchers detect important events in near real-time.

Users can define custom event criteria and allow the system to automatically detect and flag relevant moments. Detected events are presented through an intuitive interface, enabling users to monitor event status, review recent event activity, and jump directly to the corresponding point in the video recording.

By automatically highlighting significant events, the system simplifies the process of understanding what occurred, when it happened, and which animal was involved — reducing the time spent reviewing recordings and helping researchers focus on the data that matter most.

What’s new?

Data transparency by design

The Event Monitoring Tool also supports one of ActualHCA’s core principles: research data should remain fully under the user’s control.

ActualHCA generates valuable behavioural and physiological data that users can access, review and export without restriction. The system is designed to support open analysis, transparent reporting and flexible downstream use of data.

Actual Analytics does not charge users to access their own data, nor does it limit, modify or restrict how that data can be used.

Your Data. Full Ownership. Unrestricted Access.

Advanced monitoring with ActualHCA Capture 3.1.0

Alongside the new Event Monitoring Tool, ActualHCA Capture 3.1.0 introduces a range of enhancements designed to improve performance and streamline study workflows.

The update delivers full integration with the Event Monitoring Tool, enabling seamless event detection and review within the ActualHCA ecosystem.

Additional improvements include enhanced time synchronisation across multiple enclosures, supporting more consistent analysis across different animal groups and recording environments. Internal process optimisations also provide faster data handling and improved system reliability, helping studies run more efficiently.

For researchers managing multi-enclosure experiments, synchronised capture offers a significant advantage by supporting unified data collection and analysis across complex studies.

Supporting better visibility across studies

A multi-organisation validation study published in Frontiers in Toxicology used ActualHCA to continuously collect rodent behavioural and temperature data, supporting the detection of central nervous system-related effects throughout extended study periods.

The NC3Rs has also highlighted the benefits of non-invasive, continuous monitoring approaches for improving both animal welfare and scientific quality in safety pharmacology studies.

The new ActualHCA Event Monitoring Tool builds on this foundation by helping researchers extract meaningful insights more efficiently. By automatically identifying and highlighting predefined behavioural or physiological events, the tool reduces the need for time-consuming manual data review and enables users to focus more quickly on the observations that matter most.

Available from 27th July

ActualHCA Capture 3.1.0 and the ActualHCA Event Monitoring Tool 1.0.0 will be available from 27th July.

To learn more about the update, arrange a demonstration, or speak to the team about how event monitoring could support your studies, contact us at: help@actualanalytics.com

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