Towards Haptic Communication with Working Dogs in Distracting Environments

Working dogs and humans have collaborated to achieve tasks for thousands of years [26]. Trained working dogs play an essential role in many fields such as search and rescue, explosives and organic materials detection, and medical alerting. As technology advances, the animal-computer interaction community can leverage state-of-the-art hardware and software to improve the ability of working dogs and their human counterparts to communicate. Haptic vests for working dogs have shown potential for communicating nonverbal instructions from human handlers to dogs over a distance. While previous works have examined ways in which dogs can learn to associate commands with various haptic cues, none have examined this technology for working dogs as it might be used in the real world: with distractions, movement, and multiple draws for attention. This paper outlines a number of experiments to examine the effectiveness of haptic communication with working dogs in settings where external distractions are present and the dogs are experiencing high physical demands and cognitive loads.