Towards the non-visual monitoring of canine physiology in real-time by blind handlers

Abstract

One of the challenges to working with canines is that whereas humans are primarily vocal communicators, canines are primarily postural and behavioral communicators. It can take years to gain some level of proficiency at reading canine body language, even under the best of circumstances. In the case of guide dogs and visually-impaired handlers, this task is even more difficult. Luckily, new technology designed to help monitor canines may prove useful in helping handlers, especially those with visual impairments, to better understand and interpret what their working partners are feeling or saying. In prior work a light-weight, wearable, wireless physiological monitoring system was shown to be accurate for measuring canines' heart and respiratory rates [6]. In this paper, we consider the complementary problem of communicating physiological information to handlers. We introduce two nonvisual interfaces for monitoring a canine's heart and respiratory rates, an audio interface and a vibrotactile interface. We also present the results of two initial studies to evaluate the efficacy of the interfaces. In the first study we found that many participants were more confident in detecting changes in heart and respiratory rate using the audio interface, however most of the time they were just as accurate with the vibrotactile interface with only a slight increase in detection latency.