No More Woof

The world of technology expands everyday except, this time it’s for our canine companions. What if dogs could talk, tell you what’s wrong or announce the rabbit outside the door? This sounds like the talking dog, Doug, from Disney’s Pixar film “Up,” Scandinavian scientists are working to develop a headset that could do just that.

The Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery (NSID) is developing this  “No More Woof” project, the technology is aiming to distinguish the thought patterns and then issue them as short sentences through the microphone.

NSID writes on their website, “the brainwaves differ quite a lot from different races as well as individual dogs. However, it is possible to detect some common patterns and we have no doubt that in the future this technology will open up a vast new era of communication between dogs and humans, or animals in general and humans.”

“The project is combination of three different technologies in three different tech-areas; electroencephalography censoring, micro computing and special brain-computer interface software,” wrote the researchers.

Sensors in the headset detect the electric signals in the dog’s brainwaves, and the built-in technology processing the signal patterns and deciphers them into distinct feelings such as anger, curiosity, or tiredness. Sample sentences will be programmed into the device being able to say things like, “I’m hungry, but I don’t like this,” or “I’m curious who is that?”

The scientists are still trying to figure out how they will attach sensors into a dog’s brain, but issues like this are coming down to ethical and social concerns. More research is being done before any testing on animals will be preformed.

There is an option to preorder them to help the research, but the prototypes will not be out for a while. The possibilities are unlimited. “Right now we are only scraping the surface of possibilities,” the researchers write. “The first version will be quite basic. But hey, the first computer was pretty crappy too.”