HCI 2016: Using Behavioural Information to Help Owners Gather Requirements from their Dogs’ Responses to Media Technology

Yesterday I presented my full paper at HCI 2016, in Brighton!

What is the paper on?

The paper is in the field of Animal Computer Interaction (ACI), which is how animals and humans are involved in technology. My paper looked at how to gather requirements and evaluations from dogs: their feedback. This can be a challenge with non-verbal users or ones that can not write, like animals and dogs in this case. In systems where we face these problems we must instead we must use other methods such a physiological signs, tracking behaviour and interpreting behaviour through proxies. These proxies in dogs can be either their owners or an animal behaviourists who can speak on behalf of their pets. We seek too increase the amount of information collected through these proxies on the dogs responses by creating an informed observer.

But how?

Our work looks at creating a Dog Information Sheet (coined DISH) with dog behaviours to create an informed owner. We split dog owners into two groups, one with and one without DISH to test if creating this proxy informed owner helped in evaluating and gather requirements in dog technology. The dog owners then watched a video with their dog and filled in a questionnaire about their seen behaviour. This was looked at in both terms of behavioural keywords, such as ear twitches, and also the emotional context behind the behaviour.

What did we find?

It was found that using a DISH in dog-technology it was possible to get 30% more emotional context vs. non DISH users, but without DISH it was possible to collect more keywords. These keywords, however, do not have meaning without the more in-depth context. Work here seeks to improve both animal-technology and work with non-verbal and limited cognitive users.

Paper, presentation, DISH & videos!

To read more you can download full paper.

Below is the presentation presented at BHCI on the 14th July (also available via link for download which includes notes)

Dog Information Sheet (DISH) used in the study can also be downloaded here.

Finally, here is also a video of a dog taking part within the study.