@article{foster_wu_roberts_bozkurt_2022, title={Preliminary Evaluation of a System with On-Body and Aerial Sensors for Monitoring Working Dogs}, volume={22}, ISSN={["1424-8220"]}, DOI={10.3390/s22197631}, abstractNote={This paper presents a system for behavioral, environmental, and physiological monitoring of working dogs using on-body and aerial sensors. The proof of concept study presented here includes two trained dogs performing nine scent detection tasks in an uncontrolled environment encompassing approximately two acres. The dogs were outfitted with a custom designed wearable harness to monitor their heart rate, activity levels and skin temperature. We utilized a commercially available micro-air vehicle to perform aerial sensing by tracking the terrain and movement of the dog in the outdoor space. The dogs were free to explore the space working at maximal speeds to complete a scent-based search-and-retrieval task. Throughout the experiment, the harness data was transferred to a base station via Wi-Fi in real-time. In this work, we also focused on testing the performance of a custom 3D electrode with application specific ergonomic improvements and adaptive filter processing techniques to recover as much electrocardiography data as possible during high intensity motion activity. We were able to recover and use 84% of the collected data where we observed a trend of heart rate generally increasing immediately after successful target localization. For tracking the dogs in the aerial video footage, we applied a state-of-the-art deep learning algorithm designed for online object tracking. Both qualitative and quantitative tracking results are very promising. This study presents an initial effort towards deployment of on-body and aerial sensors to monitor the working dogs and their environments during scent detection and search and rescue tasks in order to ensure their welfare, enable novel dog-machine interfaces, and allow for higher success rate of remote and automated task performance.}, number={19}, journal={SENSORS}, author={Foster, Marc and Wu, Tianfu and Roberts, David L. and Bozkurt, Alper}, year={2022}, month={Oct} }
 @article{ahmmed_holder_foster_castro_patel_torfs_bozkurt_2021, title={Noncontact Electrophysiology Monitoring Systems for Assessment of Canine-Human Interactions}, ISSN={["1930-0395"]}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/sensors47087.2021.9639748}, DOI={10.1109/SENSORS47087.2021.9639748}, abstractNote={Canine-assisted interactions have enormous potential in coping with psychological disorders and stress. It has been actively used for improving the mood of hospitalized patients, especially those suffering from chronic diseases like cancer. However, little progress has been made to enable the assessment of these interactions between the patient and the animal in a quantitative and undisruptive way. In this paper, we present a capacitively coupled biopotential recording system custom-designed for animal-human dyads. This system uses noncontact electrodes to monitor the heart rate and its variability to evaluate the physiological basis of the animal-assisted therapies. Preliminary in vivo evaluation of the system in humans and canines demonstrates promising measurement accuracy. The mean absolute error of the estimated heart rate was less than 0.25 BPM in reference to a commercial electrocardiography device. The future integration of this system into ergonomic form factors could enable a better understanding of animal-human interactions during canine-assisted therapy sessions by realizing an unobtrusive and continuous monitoring platform.}, journal={2021 IEEE SENSORS}, publisher={IEEE}, author={Ahmmed, Parvez and Holder, Timothy and Foster, Marc and Castro, Ivan D. and Patel, Aakash and Torfs, Tom and Bozkurt, Alper}, year={2021} }
 @article{foster_brugarolas_walker_mealin_cleghern_yuschak_clark_adin_russenberger_gruen_et al._2020, title={Preliminary Evaluation of a Wearable Sensor System for Heart Rate Assessment in Guide Dog Puppies}, volume={20}, ISSN={["1558-1748"]}, DOI={10.1109/JSEN.2020.2986159}, abstractNote={This paper details the development of a novel wireless heart rate sensing system for puppies in training as guide dogs. The system includes a harness with on-board electrocardiography (ECG) front-end circuit, inertial measurement unit and a micro-computer with wireless capability where the major research focus of this paper was on the ergonomic design and evaluation of the system on puppies. The first phase of our evaluation was performed on a Labrador Retriever between 12 to 26 weeks in age as a pilot study. The longitudinal weekly data collected revealed the expected trend of a decreasing average heart rate and increased heart rate variability as the age increased. In the second phase, we improved the system ergonomics for a larger scale deployment in a guide dog school (Guiding Eyes for the Blind (Guiding Eyes)) on seventy 7.5-week-old puppies (heart rate coverage average of 86.7%). The acquired ECG based heart rate data was used to predict the performance of puppies in Guiding Eyes's temperament test. We used the data as an input to a machine learning model which predicted two Behavior Checklist (BCL) scores as determined by expert Guiding Eyes puppy evaluators with an accuracy above 90%.}, number={16}, journal={IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL}, author={Foster, Marc and Brugarolas, Rita and Walker, Katherine and Mealin, Sean and Cleghern, Zach and Yuschak, Sherrie and Clark, Julia Condit and Adin, Darcy and Russenberger, Jane and Gruen, Margaret and et al.}, year={2020}, pages={9449–9459} }