Towards a Multimodal Synchronized System for Quantifying Psychophysiological States in Canine Assisted Interactions

Abstract

Canine Assisted Interactions (CAI) are widely used to provide therapeutic benefits to human participants in various contexts (e.g. cancer-related fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder treatment, child reading facilitation, etc.). Despite its widespread adoption and use, questions remain about the outcomes for humans and animals involved in these interactions. Previous attempts to address these questions have suffered from core methodological weaknesses, including insufficiently objective approaches and lack of focus on the canine perspective. Using a novel integrated system composed of custom-designed and commercially available wearable devices, we present a first of its kind study to collect simultaneous and continuous physiological data from both of the CAI interactants. Our repeated measures pilot study also combined this with a novel dyadic behavioral coding system and short-, and long-term surveys. We evaluate these multimodal data streams independently, and further correlate these psychological, physiological, and behavioral metrics to better elucidate the outcomes and dynamics of CAIs. Altogether, this work takes a significant step forward on a promising path to our better understanding of how CAIs improve well-being, and how interspecies psychophysiological states can be appropriately measured.