Supporting the Work of Diabetes Alert Dogs
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Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Canine-centered interface design: supporting the work of diabetes alert dogs Conference or Workshop Item How to cite: Robinson, Charlotte; Mancini, Clara; van der Linden, Janet; Guest, Claire and Harris, Rob (2014). Canine- centered interface design: supporting the work of diabetes alert dogs. In: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 26 Apr - 01 May 2014, Toronto, Canada, ACM, pp. 3757–3766. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2014 ACM Version: Accepted Manuscript Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1145/2556288.2557396 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk Canine-Centered Interface Design: Supporting the Work of Diabetes Alert Dogs Charlotte Robinson1, Clara Mancini1, Janet van der Linden1, Claire Guest2, Rob Harris2 1Open University 2Medical Detection Dogs Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK Great Horwood MK17 0NP, UK {charlotte.robinson, clara.mancini, {claire.guest, rob.harris} janet.vanderlinden} @open.ac.uk @medicaldetectiondogs.org.uk drops in blood glucose levels, which are known as ABSTRACT Many people with Diabetes live with the continuous threat hypoglycaemic attacks. Since these attacks can be fatal of hypoglycemic attacks and the danger of going into coma. [31], they are greatly feared by diabetes patients. To try and Diabetes Alert Dogs are trained to detect the onset of an prevent them, wearable hypoglycaemia alarm machines attack before the condition of the human handler they are have been researched and developed which use skin paired with deteriorates, giving them time to take action. conductance or glucose sensors [2,6]. However, these We investigated requirements for designing an alarm machines have a certain margin of error and are often not a system allowing dogs to remotely call for help when their practical stand-alone solution to manage day to day human falls unconscious before being able to react to an hypoglycaemic attacks [10]. alert. Through a multispecies ethnographic approach we As a result, Diabetes Alert Dogs (DAD) have increased in focus on the requirements for a physical canine user popularity over the last two decades. DADs are paired with interface, involving dogs, their handlers and specialist dog human diabetes patients and are trained to warn their trainers in the design process. We discuss tensions between owners of oncoming hypoglycaemic attacks, giving them the requirements for canine and the human users, argue the time to call for help or take steps to prevent the attack [23]. need for increased sensitivity towards the needs of Diabetic alert dogs use their olfactory capabilities to detect individual dogs that goes beyond breed specific physical changes in blood sugar in real-time [5,33] and act as an characteristics, and reflect on how we can move from early-warning system for their assisted humans with shorter designing for dogs to designing with dogs. reaction times and higher precision than existing alarm Author Keywords machines, thus significantly contributing to their owners’ Diabetes Alert Dog; human-animal interaction; animal- quality of life and safety [23]. However, some computer interaction; user-centered design; multispecies hypoglycaemic attacks can be so sudden that the owner ethnography falls into a coma before being able to react to their dog’s alert. If no other humans are around, the dog is then unable ACM Classification Keywords to help further, left alone with the unconscious person. But H.5.2 User Interfaces what if technology existed that empowered the dog to take INTRODUCTION action even in a situation such as this? It is estimated that, worldwide, 371 million people currently Recently there has been an increase in the availability of suffer from diabetes, a serious disorder in sugar metabolism technological artefacts for companion animals (e.g. [25]. Insulin treatment to manage diabetes can cause sudden programmable pet-food feeders [20], remotely-played interactive pet toys [8,18] location pet tracking devices Paste the appropriate copyright/license statement here. ACM now [29,17,12,28,], and “doggie doorbells” [19]). However, supports three different publication options: many of these technologies are for leisure or for pet-owner ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the convenience. Indeed, so far there has been very little historical approach. attention to researching and developing technology that can License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an support the work of animals such as DADs in tasks of exclusive publication license. Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open critical importance. Therefore we are interested in access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. investigating how computing technology can be designed to This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assist animal workers in tasks they are already performing. assuming it is single-spaced in TimesNewRoman 8 point font. Please do More specifically, our work aims to investigate the not change or modify the size of this text box. development of a system that enables a dog to remotely call Scenario A for help on their owner’s behalf, precisely for those One day, Dan’s partner is out and he is home alone. situations in which the owner is unable to act upon their Buddy smells Dan’s blood sugar dropping and gives him dog’s alert. an alert by persistently nudging Dan. However, Dan’s levels have dropped so quickly that he has already HCI recognises the importance of user-centred design in become unaware of his surroundings. Buddy can tell that order to best support humans in their tasks and daily life. Dan is going hypo and continues nudging and pawing at Consistent with this, the growing area of Animal-Computer him. Buddy even brings Dan his blood testing kit, as he is Interaction (ACI) aims to develop a user-centred approach trained to do when his persistent nudging does not work. to the design of technology intended for animals, in order to However, it is too late: Dan has slipped into a coma. best support both their welfare and work [13,15]. To this Buddy paces back and forth, distressed that Dan is effect, ACI aims to develop frameworks that can account unresponsive. He knows his owner is in trouble but there for species-specific characteristics both at the level of is no one else in the house he can alert; he is now usability and user experience, involving animals in the powerless at his owner’s side. design process as participants and design contributors. However, pursuing user-centred design for non-human Scenario B users presents unique challenges due - on the one hand - to When Dan, at home alone with Buddy, starts having a sensory, ergonomic, cognitive, and cultural differences hypoglycaemic attack, Buddy knows how to use his between canines and humans, and - on the other hand - to special alert system to remotely contact Dan’s partner the difficulty of relying on verbal communication, so often and./or other friends or family, as soon as Dan has relied upon by interaction designers. Recently researchers become unconscious. Unless Dan is conscious and have begun to explore the possibility of adapting HCI intentionally stops the alert by typing in an override code, research methodologies which combine verbal the system is preconfigured to send an SMS to relevant communication with observational techniques [14,33]. people, who are prompted them to call him and to call However, this work is yet to be concretely applied in the emergency services if he doesn’t answer. If none of them context of specific interaction design projects for and with responds within a set time, the system calls emergency animals. Thus here we explore how existing HCI verbal and services directly with GPS coordinates of Dan’s house. nonverbal methodologies such as multispecies ethnography Buddy paces worriedly for a few minutes, but then help and iterative dynamic prototyping, combined with arrives. Dan’s chances of avoiding brain or heart ethologically informed behavioural observation, can be damage, or even death, have just skyrocketed and Buddy concretely applied to develop specific user-centred interface has been spared hours of stress. designs for assisting the work of DADs. What would the part of the system that Buddy uses look The contribution of this paper is therefore twofold: 1) we like? How would Buddy engage with it? How would his acknowledge DADs as a specific user group and explore sensorial, ergonomic, cognitive and cultural characteristics, ways of eliciting their unique requirements and integrating together with the characteristics of the tasks and his their input in the design process, in order to prototype and working environment, inform the interface design for such evaluate a range of interfaces for a canine alert system; 2) a canine alarm? And, critically, how would the researchers we identify a number of design and methodological developing such a system figure out what kind of interface implications for the development of user-centred canine Buddy might want to do his job? In order to address these interfaces, thus contributing to the development of ACI as questions, we conducted ethnographic research at the UK’s a research area. leading DAD training center. Working alongside dogs and SCENARIO their trainers, we explores ways of uncovering requirements Dan has Type 1 diabetes and lives in fear of of such an alarm by involving the dogs themselves in the hypoglycaemia. Like approximately 25% of diabetic design process.