AGILE: AGility Innovations Leveraging Electronics

For over fifty years, human handlers and their dogs have been participating in the sport of canine agility. Agility involves collaboration between human and dog participants to navigate safely at high speed through pre-designed obstacle courses. While the sport is generally regarded as safe for the dog participants, emerging research has recently shown that over 40% of agility dogs will suffer an injury while training or competing. Despite the sport being relatively mature, very little research has so far been conducted to quantify the performance and welfare of dogs who participate in the sport of agility. In this paper, we present the AGILE project which aims to leverage electronic sensors to measure and analyze external load factors, recognize patterns of activity within the sensor data, and communicate the measurements and recognized activities to handlers. We have created a custom collar-worn activity monitor and assessed the viability of utilizing this unit for collecting agility activity data by conducting an experiment with 22 trained agility dogs. Additionally, we have developed a prototype smartphone application based on input and feedback from agility handlers. Finally, we have evaluated the efficacy of our application to meet the needs of agility handlers with a user study.