Communicating With Your Dog?
- Jan 1, 2017
- 3 min read
Do you ever wonder what your dog is feeling? In 2015, a biologist from Tokyo, Japan, named Joji Yamaguchi invented the world’s first mental visualizer for dogs. The device is shaped like a harness and can be wrapped around your dog’s body. There are two functions of the device: visualizing your dog’s emotions and collecting daily health data. This device, called “Inupathy” (a combination of the words “insight” and “empathy”), is a heart rate sensor based on Heart Rate Variation (HRV) analysis. The team behind Inupathy collected HRV data for happy, focused, excited, and relaxed states and encoded it into the device. Therefore, when the heart rate sensor recognizes a similar pattern, the machine will emit LED colors that coordinate with the dog’s mental state. Right now, Inupathy only has four stages: red is for excitement, blue is for calmness, white is for concentration, and rainbow is for happiness. Yamaguchi and his team plan to expand the capabilities of Inupathy by adding more emotional states.
The harness can also be synced with an app. Not only does the app allow you to keep track of your dog’s overall health, it also provides a “Let’s Play” mode, which will suggest games to play with your dog. The app also shows the change in your dog’s mood as the game goes on and rates how much fun your dog is having on a scale of one to one-hundred. This allows you to deepen your relationship with your dog by connecting on a whole new level. There have been thirty tests on this device thus far, and user feedback has shown that Inupathy improved the owner-pet relationship.
The ability to understanding a dog’s emotional state is an incredible feat; however, what if this could be taken a step further towards understanding dog’s dreams? Doctor Deirdre Barrett, a teacher and a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School, researches dogs and their dreams. From her recent study, Dr. Barrett speculates that dogs dream about “[their owner’s] face, smell and of pleasing or annoying you.” Her reason stems from the idea that humans and dogs have a similar sleep cycle, which means humans and dogs both enter REM sleep where dreams take place. She concludes that, since humans dream about things they are interested in from daily life, dogs do the same thing. Since dogs are extremely attracted to their owners, they most likely are dreaming of their owners! There is still no specific evidence or other studies on this theory, but Dr. Barrett hopes to continue her research by developing future experiments.
In my opinion, the new mental visualiser and Dr. Barrett’s theory are the beginning steps for humans to discover a way to communicate and understand animals, from house pets to wild creatures. If we finally are able to understand animals, will we continue to treat them as “animals” or consider them as part of our society? What do you think?
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Photo Source:
http://www.aquapets-show.com.tw/taipei/visitorProductDetail.asp?no=10233
Bella Hoang is a member of the class of 2018 and a guest writer for Lamplighter.
If you are interested in becoming a staff writer, contributor, or guest writer for Lamplighter please reach out to either our Editor-in-Chief Anja Stadelmann '17 or our Management editor Richard Tarpey '17. Their contact information can be found in our 'Meet The Staff' section of our website.
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