Noncontact Electrophysiology Monitoring Systems for Assessment of Canine-Human Interactions

Canine-assisted interactions have enormous potential in coping with psychological disorders and stress. It has been actively used for improving the mood of hospitalized patients, especially those suffering from chronic diseases like cancer. However, little progress has been made to enable the assessment of these interactions between the patient and the animal in a quantitative and undisruptive way. In this paper, we present a capacitively coupled biopotential recording system custom-designed for animal-human dyads. This system uses noncontact electrodes to monitor the heart rate and its variability to evaluate the physiological basis of the animal-assisted therapies. Preliminary in vivo evaluation of the system in humans and canines demonstrates promising measurement accuracy. The mean absolute error of the estimated heart rate was less than 0.25 BPM in reference to a commercial electrocardiography device. The future integration of this system into ergonomic form factors could enable a better understanding of animal-human interactions during canine-assisted therapy sessions by realizing an unobtrusive and continuous monitoring platform.