Force Measurement Analyses

For cleaning and analysis of graphs, such as animal closing force measurements. 'forceR' was initially written and optimized to deal with insect bite force measurements, but can be used for any time series. Includes a full workflow to load, plot and crop data, correct amplifier and baseline drifts, identify individual peak shapes (bites), rescale (normalize) peak curves, and find best polynomial fits to describe and analyze force curve shapes.

forceR

A vignette which guides you through all functions of the package is available here.

Functionality

The package forceR has originally been written for insect bite force data preparation and analysis, but it can be used for any kind of time series measurements. Functions include

• loading, plotting, and cropping of data
• correction of charge amplifier drifts
• correction of baseline drifts
• reduction of sampling frequency
• automatic extraction of single peaks
• rescaling (normalization) of curves
• reduction of curves to 100 time steps each
• finding of best polynomial fits to describe all curves

Installation

Official release

To install the stable version of forceR from CRAN use the following command:

install.packages('forceR')

Development version

You can also install the current development version of forceR from the GitHub repository:

require(devtools)
devtools::install_github("https://github.com/Peter-T-Ruehr/forceR")

Version history

Check out the News page of forceR.

Citation

If you use this package, please cite the original publication:

Rühr, PT & Blanke, A (2022): forceX and forceR: a mobile setup and R package to measure and analyze a wide range of animal closing forces. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13(9): p. 1938--1948. doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.13909.