Among biomedical researchers, telemetry (also called radiotelemetry) almost always refers to monitoring physiologic signals from animal subjects. Telemetry is considered to be the gold standard of physiological data collection because it provides data free of the artifacts common to other data collection methods, such as infection or handling stress. In vivo safety pharmacology studies are strongly recommended to use telemetry to produce data.
Animals are instrumented with transmitters that monitor the signals of interest. A partial list:
Arterial blood pressure
Electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG)
Electroencephalogram (EEG)
electromyogram (EMG)
Intraocular pressure
Left ventricular pressure
Pleural pressure
Temperature
The digitized signals are sent from the transmitter to a receiver via radio frequencies. After collection the data is processed. Most telemetric acquisition systems store the data in computers for further processing and manipulation, although analog outputs for equipment such as stripchart recorders are also used.