Cyborg Messenger Dog To The Rescue
Of course, the practice of using dogs for search and rescue is nothing new. They’re still used in law enforcement, fire departments and other organizations dedicated to protecting the safety of human life. Now, it seems that even man’s best friend is not immune to the involvement of technology to make them more effective at their job.
A student named Laura Boffi from Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and some of her colleagues have developed a special collar for dogs who are used in search and rescue. The collar is a piece of technology that allows dogs to tag the location of survivors in a life-threatening situation and send back messages from the survivors to family, friends and other people of interest. According to Boffi, survivors feel fear and displacement in the first hours of being in-danger and their desire is to notify the people close to them about their safety and present status. The dogs used to test the high-tech collar have been called “messenger dogs” and they wear a special uniform that is equipped with a recording device to take messages and also collect data about geolocation and the time in which the message was recorded.
To simplify use of this device, the selected dogs only need to be trained to sit in front of the people they’re supposed to find. Then a accelerometer located in the collar is used to activate the device, causing it to read when the dog is sitting and a located survivor is free to record a video or type out a message in text. This concept of the messenger dog could definitely see practical application and success in the future as long as the training of the dog and the technology itself are proven to be effective.
Tags: Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Laura Boffi, Messenger Dog
