Active, responsive, non-equilibrium materials–at the forefront of materials engineering–offer dynamical restructuring, mobility and other complex life-like properties. Yet, this enhanced functionality significantly amplifies the size and complexity of datasets needed for characterization, thereby challenging conventional analysis approaches.

To meet this need, we present BARCODE: Biomaterial Activity Readouts to Categorize, Optimize, Design and Engineer, an open-access software that automates high throughput screening of microscopy video data to enable non-equilibrium material optimization and discovery. BARCODE produces a unique fingerprint or ‘barcode’ of performance metrics that visually and quantitatively encodes dynamic material properties, significantly reducing data dimensionality and size, while providing rich, multiparametric outputs and rapid tractable characterization.

We analyze a series of biomaterial datasets to demonstrate BARCODE’s abilities to accelerate and streamline screening and analysis, reveal unexpected correlations and emergence, and enable broad non-expert data access, comparison, and sharing.