Linking Labs: Interconnecting Experimental Environments
This work addresses the challenge of enabling collaborative, decentralized experimental execution for researchers across institutions, aiming to improve outreach, subject recruitment, and the integration of diverse experimental tools.
This paper proposes LabLinking, a framework for interconnecting experimental laboratories across various boundaries. It defines LabLinking Levels (LLL) to quantify the degree of empirical interconnection and outlines the necessary technological infrastructure.
We introduce the concept of LabLinking: a technology-based interconnection of experimental laboratories across institutions, disciplines, cultures, languages, and time zones - in other words experiments without borders. In particular, we introduce LabLinking levels (LLL), which define the degree of tightness of empirical interconnection between labs. We describe the technological infrastructure in terms of hard- and software required for the respective LLLs and present examples of linked laboratories along with insights about the challenges and benefits. In sum, we argue that linked labs provide a unique platform for a continuous exchange between scientists and experimenters, thereby enabling a time synchronous execution of experiments performed with and by decentralized user and researchers, improving outreach and ease of subject recruitment, allowing to establish new experimental designs and to incorporate a panoply of complementary biosensors, devices, hard- and software solutions.