BARCODE: Biomaterial Activity Readouts to Categorize, Optimize, Design and Engineer for high throughput screening and characterization of dynamically restructuring soft materials

Active material systems manifest a wide range of dynamic features, such as stiffening, restructuring and flow. Understanding how composition influences multiscale structure and mechanics is crucial to developing predictive relationships between material formulation and performance and realizing practical engineering designs. To address the challenge of analyzing video data with large size and complexity, we present BARCODE (Biomaterial Activity Readouts to Categorize, Optimize, Design and Engineer), an open-access software for democratized discovery and optimization of active biomaterials. Here, we describe the design and architecture of the BARCODE platform. Using the low-cost, high-throughput image processing methods of image binarization, optical flow, and comparison of pixel intensity distributions, we demonstrate that we can quantitatively describe large datasets in terms of their structural and dynamic properties, while significantly reducing the dimensionality and size of data. The program streamlines on-system screening and accelerates analysis, while facilitating non-expert data access, sharing and comparison of metrics across different materials and groups, thereby unlocking the capability of complex multiphase multiscale soft materials in fit for purpose applications.