Robot Workshop

1
Human-dog interaction as inspiration for future
assistance robots Shaun Lawson School of
Computing, Napier University, Edinburgh UK
(s.lawson_at_napier.ac.uk)
2
Seizures and their prediction ROBOT WORKSHOP,
VIKTORIA INSTITUTE, JAN 2005

• It is estimated that 1 in every 133, or 5.5
  million, people in Europe, have epilepsy, of
  which a quarter can have seizures which cannot be
  controlled by any therapy.
• A system that could detect the impending onset of
  a seizure has the potential to create a
  significant improvement to the quality of life of
  many such people.
• Almost all research in seizure prediction to-date
  has concentrated on the off-line analysis of
  recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) signals.
• However, no definitive conclusions on the sensor
  system required, the modelling and manual
  classification of typical data, or the most
  appropriate algorithms for the machine processing
  of data have emerged.

3
Seizure Alert Dogs ROBOT WORKSHOP, VIKTORIA
INSTITUTE, JAN 2005

• There is mounting evidence to suggest that dogs
  can, very reliably, predict the onset of a
  seizure in their owners.
• This ability can be exhibited by dogs with no
  formal training, however most are trained by
  organisations such as the Support Dogs charity in
  Sheffield in the UK.
• It is currently unclear as to exactly how dogs
  recognise pre-seizure conditions, though work to
  date indicates that they rely primarily on visual
  cues such as facial expressions, postures and
  general behaviour as opposed, for example, to
  olfactory and auditory cues.
• Other physiological cues such as muscle tension,
  respiratory and perspiration might also be
  monitored by dogs using visual, olfactory or
  auditory senses.

4
Are they any good at it? ROBOT WORKSHOP,
VIKTORIA INSTITUTE, JAN 2005

• Other researchers, both clinicians and computer
  scientists, are usually very sniffy about
  Seizure Alert Dogs.
• Support Dogs have reported that, once trained,
  every dog in a study group of six animals was
  able to predict every subsequent seizure in their
  owner.
• The advance warning period between dogs did vary
  from 45 to 10 minutes but, once training for an
  individual dog was complete, this warning time
  did not vary.
• Interestingly dogs have also been shown to reduce
  the frequency of seizures over time.

Support Dog - Harvey
5
Our project ROBOT WORKSHOP, VIKTORIA INSTITUTE,
JAN 2005

• A small inter-disciplinary research consortium
  has been formed the HCI Group at Napier, the
  Canine Behaviour Centre, at the School of
  Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, and the
  Support Dogs charity.
• We also have a clinical partner to advise on
  ethics etc.
• We are attempting to exploit the ability of
  trained Seizure Alert Dogs to inform the
  development of software and systems that can
  detect seizures well in advance of any previously
  proposed artificial methods.
• A proposal for a 3 year study is ready for
  submission to the UK EPSRC AIBACS (Adaptive and
  Interactive Behaviour of Animal Computational
  Systems) programme.

6
Objectives of the project ROBOT WORKSHOP,
VIKTORIA INSTITUTE, JAN 2005

• To determine the stimuli used by trained Seizure
  Alert Dogs when seizure alerting.
• To develop visual and physiological sensor
  systems to monitor, as closely as is possible,
  the same behavioural and physiological signs as
  the dogs and to use dogs to label or classify the
  output of the sensor systems.
• To apply and develop soft computing systems for
  autonomously classifying sensor data, acquired
  under realistic conditions, as pre-seizure or
  normal, and to use dogs to evaluate the
  effectiveness of such systems.
• To improve Seizure Alert Dog selection and
  training and to assess the potential of creating
  assistive technology for deployment in homes, or
  worn by a user, in the future.

7
Dog-human interaction ROBOT WORKSHOP, VIKTORIA
INSTITUTE, JAN 2005

• As is evident in the lack of current knowledge
  about how dogs perform seizure alerting, the
  complexities of dog-human social cognition are
  not yet fully understood.
• Pioneering work is ongoing in this area by the
  likes of Wells, Mills et al in the UK and
  elsewhere by Miklósi and Pongrácz et al.
• Some observations of dog-human inter-action have
  been used by computer scientists to inform the
  construction of a number of, mostly
  entertainment-based, systems.
• The Synthetic Characters group at MIT have
  reported a number of simulations that exhibit
  both dog-dog and dog-human interactions whilst
  dog-like robotic toys, most famously the Sony
  AIBO, can now be easily purchased.

8
Embodiment of systems? ROBOT WORKSHOP, VIKTORIA
INSTITUTE, JAN 2005

• If successful, our project will make a
  contribution towards future Electronic Assistive
  Technology (EAT) systems which aim to determine
  the state of health of an individual.
• It is inevitable that future EAT systems will
  also exploit advances in technologies such as
  ubiquitous, ambient and wearable computing and we
  have proposed passive sensor based solutions as a
  first generation system.
• However the social acceptance of invisible
  pervasive monitoring systems is predicted to be
  patchy at best.
• Perhaps more significant for our work is that
  dogs probably use interaction with our humans to
  predict seizures and also that interaction with
  dogs reduces seizures.
• So in future, will we see Aibo wearing the
  Support Dog vest?