Photo by Adam Griffin
Designing a Canine-Centred Alarm for Medical Alert Dogs
This was the doctoral project of Dr Charlotte Robinson, who started in January 2013 and completed in September 2018, supervised by Prof Clara Mancini and Prof Janet van der Linden. The project was in collaboration with UK Charity Medical Detection Dogs.
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Overview
Many people with conditions such as Diabetes live with the continuous threat of hypoglycemic attacks, or other medical emergencies, and the danger of going into coma, or becoming dangerously incapacitated. Diabetes Alert Dogs, and more generally Medical Alert Dogs, are trained to detect the onset of an emergency before the condition of the assisted human they are paired with deteriorates, giving them time to take action. However, oftentimes the human’s condition is so brittle that they have no time to respond to the dog’s alert before they become completely and dangerously incapacitated, at which point the dog is powerless to offer further help.
The project researched the design of an alarm system allowing dogs to remotely call for help when their human becomes incapacitated. Through a combined approach including multispecies ethnography, rapid prototyping and user testing, the research aimed to identify the best design of a physical canine user interface as well as involving dogs, their handlers and specialist dog trainers in the design process as participants.
The project explored tensions between the requirements for canine and the human users, it highlighted the need for increased sensitivity towards the needs of individual dogs that goes beyond breed specific physical characteristics, and provided a platform to reflect on how ACI researchers might be able to move from designing for to designing with dogs and other nonhuman animals.
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The Challenge
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The dogs needed to interact with the alarm as autonomous users, so the interaction needed to be safe, efficient, easy to learn and to remember.
This particular design concept comprised an electronic module that would trigger a call to a phone line, and a biteable tug for the dog to use as an input device, connected to the electronic module by a trigger.
But what should the tug be like? What should its size, shape, texture or material be?
What kind of trigger should connect it to the electronic module? Should the tug detach when pulled or should it stay in place?
How should the system give the dog feedback to let them know that they have successfully raised the alarm?
The approach
To answer these questions, Charlotte used what we call ‘quick and dirty’ prototyping to engage in physical conversations with our canine users. She formulated a modular template for a canine alarm, consisting of a tug for the dog to use as input device, a block of wood in lieu of the alarm’s electronic module and a trigger connecting the two. In this way, she could quickly present canine participants with successive combinations of different tugs and different triggers.​
This ‘dialogue’ suggested that the dogs preferred a simple and tidy set-up not to confuse them; a detachable tug that worked as a form of feedback letting them know that they had completed the task; and customizable tug- and trigger-resistance depending on the dog’s age, training stage and personality.​
Below is an example of a canine user in action with a customized tug.
Photos by Charlotte Robinson
Further readings
Robinson, C., Mancini, C., van der Linden, J., Guest, C., Swanson, L., Marsden, H., Valencia, J., Aengenheister, B. (2015). Designing an emergency communication system for human and assistance dog partnerships. Proc. ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp’15, ACM Press, pp. 337-347.
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Robinson, C., Mancini, C., van der Linden, J., Guest, C., Swanson, L. (2015). Exploring assistive technology for assistance dog owners in emergency situations. PETRA ’15: Proc. ACM International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments, ACM Press.
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Robinson, C., Mancini, C., van der Linden, J., Swanson, L., Guest, C. (2014). Exploring the Use of Personas for Designing with Dogs. Workshop on Animal-Computer Interaction: Pushing Boundaries Beyond ‘Human’, NordiCHI2014, 24th October, Helsinki.
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Robinson, C., Mancini, C., van der Linden, J., Guest, C., Harris, R. (2014). Empowering Assistance Dogs: An Alarm Interface for Canine Use. Symposium on Intelligent Systems for Animal Welfare, ISAWEL’14, Proc. 50th convention on Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, AISB’14.
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Robinson, C., Mancini, C., van der Linden, J., Guest, C., Harris, R. (2014). Canine-Centered Interface Design: Supporting the Work of Diabetes Alert Dogs. Proc. International ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI’14, ACM Press, pp. 3757-3766.