A Vibrotactile Vest for Remote Human-Dog Communication

Dogs have been helping humans in different ways since prehistoric times. Modern working dogs perform tasks ranging from search-and-rescue to bomb detection, but relatively little work has been done on the use of technology with working dogs. Therefore, communication with working dogs is still predominantly visual and audial. In this paper, we introduce a vest with four embedded vibration motors in specially designed motor housings. The vest applies vibrotactile cues to the dog that wears it, and the dog is trained to associate the cues with practical commands. The commands are issued to the vest from a handler with a wireless remote. We demonstrate the vest using a test subject: a six year old male Labrador Retriever/German Shepherd Dog crossbreed. We test the perception threshold of the test subject to haptic cues, and its proficiency in understanding several haptic cues. These cues differ in location and/or waveform. Our case study shows that the dog was able to successfully learn haptic commands in this way. This apparatus may prove beneficial for search and rescue purposes, working dog operation, training deaf dogs, and training by handlers with speech impairments.