Written for Jacobs Institute Spark Grant, UC Berkeley, Spring 2022. The funded proposal to build a canine EEG headset, and the first written plan for what became Dognosis.

Project Details

Dogs possess sophisticated olfactory capabilities that grant them the ability to detect the presence of cancer (Taverna et al., 2015), malaria (Guest et al., 2019) and COVID-19 (Jendrny et al., 2020) in human individuals. The latter has garnered widespread buzz as canines seem capable of detecting even asymptomatic COVID cases (Dickey & Junqueira, 2021) and a handful of dogs are currently employed at airports and sporting venues to sniff out infections (Bellware & Suliman, 2021). Challenges in scaling are many and include the resource and time intensive training required as well as difficulties in maintaining the privacy of individuals identified as infected.

The goal of DogDoc will be to build a customized EEG (Electroencephalogram) headset to record brain activity from dogs while they are trained to detect certain scents. This data will be used to train a ML classifier with the aim of mapping EEG brainwaves to specific scents such that the presence of an odorant can be identified directly from the brain data. This will allow canines in the field to alert human guardians about the presence of a disease anonymously, as the information can be beamed directly to a smartphone, as well as improve upon the time required for training by providing quantifiable thresholds in scent detection accuracy.

Technology like DogDoc that harness the olfactory power of dogs could be a huge boon in the fight against COVID-19 as the ubiquity of our canine friends can allow for continuous, rapid and inexpensive testing. Such technology can be readily extended to future pandemics as well as other diseases such as malaria to provide medical diagnosis to people who otherwise may lack the resources to get tested. Prior research in the 1960’s by Walter Freeman and others in rabbits indicate that different odorants produce specific EEG activity that are mathematically distinguishable from each other (Freeman & Baird, 1987). However, such experiments were extremely invasive and used intracranial electrodes that required surgery as well as sedating animal subjects to minimize movement artifacts. More recently, a 2020 Nature study was able to use EEG activity to identify specific processing features of visual information in canine cortices. The dogs involved in the study were bred to be lab subjects and were trained for 18 months to sit still for the experiments. The fur on their head also had to be tonsured off. (Kujala et al., 2020)

DogDoc will utilise the advancements in electrode technology and data science to identify odorants using surface electrodes that sit atop a dog’s furry head. As far as I know, this will be the first study of this kind to investigate canine olfaction using EEG. I am in correspondence with UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Lucia Jacobs, who is an expert on canine olfaction (Jinn et al., 2020), and has agreed to mentor me with canine cognition research. She has extensive contacts with highly skilled dog handlers at the California Search and Rescue Dog Association who would be willing to come to sites on campus and volunteer as dog-human dyads.

As a senior in Cognitive Science at Cal, I have taken multiple courses in cognitive neuroscience and computer/data science. I have taken PsychC127 - Cognitive Neuroscience twice, with both Professor’s Ivry and Gallant, where we extensively discussed the nature of the mapping between brain activity and perceptual reality. I have experience working with brain data after taking Brain Imaging Methods with Professor Weiner where I wrote my final paper analysing open-source LSD fMRI data to identify meta-state transitions. I am also familiar with EEG brain activity after auditing CogSci190: Rhythms of the Brain with Professor Ramirez. I have been independently researching how to build an EEG headset and have schematics of functional devices using resources from OpenEEG. I am also in touch with fellow Cal students in student clubs who have experience hacking together headsets and would be willing to guide me.

I hope to assemble a functional headset by the end of February, test and iterate over the design in March, collect data from at least five canine subjects in April and analyse the data and publish results by the end of the grant cycle in May. I will also publish the data on an open-source platform like OpenNeuro to encourage open science. A Spark grant is essential to the success of my project as I need the funding and resources of the Makerspace to design and build the canine EEG headset. This will include designing and 3D printing an adjustable electrode headset, putting together the EEG device itself and building a housing unit for the device that can be safely placed in a canine vest. As I do not have much experience with design and prototyping, especially methods such as soldering/3D printing, I expect to consult with Jacobs advisors, mentors and peers at every step of the process and learn to utilize their expertise to accomplish my goal.

The origins of my project begun last summer with the death of my family’s canine companion Lily. She passed away during labour due to the inadequacy of veterinary facilities in my hometown and we were left to hand rear the four puppies left without their mother. It was during this time I learned about the amazing ability for dogs to sniff out disease and realised that by allowing them to help us, we can also help them. My hope for DogDoc is to not just revolutionise medical diagnosis systems and the current healthcare model but also to catalyse a movement towards a canine-human relationship that is symbiotic and bidirectional, one that acknowledges indigenous wisdom by emphasizing “mutual connectivity, shared responsibility and interdependent well-being”. (Shorter, 2016)

Impact Statement

According to Heidegger, the essence of modern technology is a revealing - “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.” (Heidegger, 1954, p. 6) However, the mode of revealing of current technology is a “challenging” which ends up reduced subjects and entities to vessels qualified by their degree of ‘standing-reserve’. An alternate mode of revealing for technology exists - poiesis - that can be understood as a form of unconcealment or bringing-forth of the true nature of things. I believe this idea of poiesis is at the heart of the kind of technological innovation the Jacob Institute stands for and poiesis permeates the goal of DogDoc. More than 900 million dogs romp around on Earth and each one of them has the potential to detect disease and save human lives. We should be engaging with them as fellow comrades and allies and not just as pets.

Ultimately, the success of DogDoc can enable continuous, widespread and cheap medical testing for a plethora of diseases that will allow for the early detection and treatment of diseases in individuals and communities who might not have the resources for conventional medical tests. As such, DogDoc could be the most impactful for resource-deprived communities in places like India and Africa. If the pilot device is successful, the technology will be first deployed in Belagavi, India and will rely on the rehabilitation and training of street dogs as resident DogDocs, thus providing resources to both the humans and canines who most need it.

As an international student from a small city in India, I have had limited opportunities growing up to bring my ideas to life. My exposure to information technology was limited to learning MS Paint in middle school computer classes. My hope is to continue to work to scale this technology after I graduate and inspire and provide young people back in my hometown opportunities to contribute to technoscientific progress.

References

  • Bellware, K., & Suliman, A. (2021, September 9). Coronavirus-sniffing dogs unleashed at Miami airport to detect virus in employees. The Washington Post. ↗
  • Dickey, T., & Junqueira, H. (2021). Toward the use of medical scent detection dogs for COVID-19 screening. Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, 121(2), 141–148. ↗
  • Freeman, W. J., & Baird, B. (1987). Relation of olfactory EEG to behavior: Spatial analysis. Behavioral Neuroscience, 101(3), 393–408. ↗
  • Guest, C., Pinder, M., Doggett, M., Squires, C., Affara, M., Kandeh, B., Dewhirst, S., Morant, S. V., D’Alessandro, U., Logan, J. G., & Lindsay, S. W. (2019). Trained dogs identify people with malaria parasites by their odour. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 19(6), 578–580. ↗
  • Heidegger, M. (1954). The question concerning technology. In C. Hanks (Ed.), Technology and values: Essential readings (pp. 99–113). Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ↗
  • Jendrny, P., Schulz, C., Twele, F., Meller, S., von Köckritz-Blickwede, M., Osterhaus, A. D. M. E., Ebbers, J., Pilchová, V., Pink, I., Welte, T., Manns, M. P., Fathi, A., Ernst, C., Addo, M. M., Schalke, E., & Volk, H. A. (2020). Scent dog identification of samples from COVID-19 patients – a pilot study. BMC Infectious Diseases, 20(1), 536. ↗
  • Jinn, J., Connor, E. G., & Jacobs, L. F. (2020). How ambient environment influences olfactory orientation in search and rescue dogs. Chemical Senses, 45(8), 625–634. ↗
  • Kujala, M. V., Kauppi, J.-P., Törnqvist, H., Helle, L., Vainio, O., Kujala, J., & Parkkonen, L. (2020). Time-resolved classification of dog brain signals reveals early processing of faces, species and emotion. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 19846. ↗
  • Shorter, D. D. (2016). Spirituality. In F. E. Hoxie (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of American Indian history. Oxford University Press. ↗
  • Taverna, G., Tidu, L., Grizzi, F., Torri, V., Mandressi, A., Sardella, P., La Torre, G., Cocciolone, G., Seveso, M., Giusti, G., Hurle, R., Santoro, A., & Graziotti, P. (2015). Olfactory system of highly trained dogs detects prostate cancer in urine samples. The Journal of Urology, 193(4), 1382–1387. ↗