Sponsor: Army Research Office
Team Members: Nick Bagot, Troy Coffield, Margaret Goodman, Emily Thompson
Project Description: Working dogs play an integral role in the day to day operations of both military soldiers and law enforcement officers worldwide. All canine handlers and trainers use protective bite sleeves for engagement and apprehension training. However, the canine bite sleeves on the market today fail to measure the bite force of the working dog. The result is that trainers must rely on years of training experience to subjectively evaluate their canines which may result in ineffective training, canine/handler injury or unsafe environments during operations. The goal of this project is to continue ARO’s efforts on the design of bite sleeve that provides feedback, by way of embedded sensors, on the canine’s bite profile to the canine handler. Canine bite profile includes bite print, bite pressure and total time the canine is engaged in the bite. This item can be used in a number of training scenarios for a canine handler to understand how engaged the canine is during training, understand canine fitness and give clues to canine jaw and dental health. Ideally canine bite profile data will be live streamed to a computer or application for real time data evaluation. This project seeks to determine the materials and electronics in the bite sleeve system by developing and executing experiments to understand, translate and define pressure exerted on sleeve to real data both in the laboratory experiments and live field exercises with military working dogs.
This project will involve a design team from the TE/TT capstone course and a design team from the ECE capstone course.
The TE/TT team will develop a test platform that accurately correlates canine bite pressure within the system, understand the nuances of force/pressure dissipation within the system and incorporate the appropriate sensors into a commercially available sleeve.
The ECE team will be tasked with evaluating force sensors that can withstand the impact of a working dog’s bite, as well as accurately record the force of the working dog’s bite. The team will also develop a ruggedized wireless system for data transfer, create a web application that obtains, stores and displays bite profile data from in real time. The ultimate goal allows trainers to view bite profile data via a handheld device in real time.