Canine emotional states assessment with heart rate variability

Abstract

Emotions of a person affect the person's performance in a task and so do emotions of a rescue dog that works after disasters. Hence, estimating emotions of a rescue dog by the handler can improve its performance and welfare. Emotions also appear in physiological signals such as heart rate variability (HRV). In fact, HRV has information of emotions in both cases of human and dogs. To make emotion estimation more practical, we proposed a method for emotion estimation from HRV of dogs and evaluated its performance using real data. The method classified positive, negative, and neutral emotions with 88% accuracy within each subject and 72% over all subjects. These accuracies are high enough for practical use in rescue dogs.