A fully automated heart frequency logger for shelled invertebrates and associated data processing R package

Abstract Measuring cardiac frequency provides a non‐invasive approach to quantifying sublethal stress responses of invertebrates to environmental stressors, such as heat stress. Existing cardiac monitoring methods rely on limited‐performance hardware, and data processing is still largely manual or semi‐automated. This makes current approaches cumbersome, restricting the complexity and scalability of experiments that can be done. To address these challenges, we developed a fully automated toolkit that integrates hardware, firmware and a new R package ‘ heartbeatr ’ to streamline the collection and analysis of large volumes of cardiac data. We assessed heartbeatr 's automated frequency detection against a curated database of 78,769 manually assessed heartbeats, demonstrating high reliability. We provide recommendations for conducting long‐term, high‐throughput cardiac monitoring in ecological research.