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Monkey Database

Department​

Psychology

Summary​

The lab conducts many studies on the same population of monkeys and collects all of their data in Excel Worksheets. This works well for analyzing individual studies, but they needed a system for tracking subjects across multiple studies to compare their performance at different tasks. To help with this we created a database with a custom R library for adding and accessing census and study data. For lab members that are not familiar with R, or just want to quickly browse the data we created a website using R-Shiny.

Key Benefits to the Lab​

  • The database-backed solution increased the reliability of adding, locating, and retrieving information from the multiyear data set
  • Working with a consolidated data set made performing more complicated analyses, such as investigating long-term trends across studies, easier
  • The web interface increased the number of lab staff who could leverage the data by making the information more accessible to less-technical users

Details​

A psychology lab needed a good way to analyze their data across multiple studies, so we developed a website, database, and R library for them to work with all of their data.

The website we developed shows a view of several types of data and allows researchers to filter and export the data to quickly look at trends. Some stats are also designed to be used by researchers in the field to identify animals that meet their requirements, and are likely to participate in different types of studies. The website is the primary interface to the data for undergraduate students.

The database base used in this project is a MongoDB, noSQL type database. This flexibility allows us to store and process study data even though some studies have different structures and data layouts without having to try and fit the data to the tool. 

The R library we developed enables lab managers, graduate students and post-docs to work with the database in more advanced ways than the website allows. Lab managers use this interface to add censuses and new study data.

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