Abstract
Physiological measurements of dogs' emotional states during human-animal interactions are essential for understanding the underlying biological relationship. Heart rate measured by electrocardiogram (ECG) can be used for the physiological measurement of emotional state. Soft disposable electrodes, which can be purchased commercially and reduce the risk of an injury on hitting objects, are used to measure the heart rate during working dogs' exercise. However, the heart rate measurements using soft disposable electrodes in M-X lead layout are unstable due to the detachment of electrodes during intensive movement. In addition, the collection of accurately labeled ECG data, which reflects the emotion of the working dog during exercise, is a key issue to conduct reliable estimation and visualization of the working dog's emotional states. In this paper, we propose an innerwear that fixes soft disposable electrodes in M-X lead layout on a dog's body for measuring the heart rates of exercising dogs, even during intense movement. We experimentally tested the proposed method using seven dogs. Our proposed system reduced the time required to attach soft disposable electrodes by more than two-thirds and enabled the measurement of >97% of the heartbeats in exercising dogs. We also proposed a method for collecting ECG data with reliable positive/negative emotional labels of search and rescue (SAR) dogs. A combination of the collected data with the emotion estimation algorithm proposed in previous studies estimated SAR dogs' positive/negative emotions at 97.9% accuracy. The transition of the two SAR dogs' emotions during drills was visualized using the collected data.
Highlights
Human-animal interactions are the subject of an interesting and relatively new scientific research field
The accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure were 0.9792, 0.9347, 0.8871, and 0.9080, respectively. These results suggest that the proposed data collection method can be used for gathering ECG data of search and rescue (SAR) dogs’ positive/negative emotions, and the accuracy of positive/negative emotion estimation is over 97%
The results show that the positive emotion estimation might be used to judge SAR dogs' person-found actions
Summary
Human-animal interactions are the subject of an interesting and relatively new scientific research field. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are the best model animals for such studies. These animals have coexisted with humans for more than 30,000 years and are included as partners in human societies. Dogs have acquired humanlike communication skills and can form emotional bonds with humans. The emotional connections between humans and dogs are strong, unique among mammals, and are thought to enhance human-dog co-habituation. Dogs have acquired a unique niche in modern society. Some dogs even exhibit superior abilities to interact with humans, such as guide dogs for humans with disabilities and search and rescue (SAR) dogs
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