Device Promises Dog Translations
Soon instead of barking pointlessly at you, your dog will be angrily asking you for food...
European inventors have received funding to develop "No More Woof," an electronic device that promises to analyze dogs' brain waves and translate their thoughts into rudimentary English.
It's still a work in progress, but once No More Woof is ready for the market, it will join a wide range of other scientific efforts aimed at "breaking the language barrier between animals and humans," as the inventors state on their IndieGoGo.com fundraising page.
Developed by the design team (pictured below) at the Sweden-based Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery (NSID), the No More Woof is a lightweight headset, sized for dogs, with sensors that can record electroencephalogram (EEG) readings.
The EEG readings are then analyzed by a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which will, according to NSID, be programmed to translate those EEG readings into simple phrases like, "I'm hungry," or "Who is that person?" Once translated, those phrases will be reported over a small speaker.
If and when the No More Woof ever comes to market, it would mark the latest in a centuries-old effort to communicate with dogs. The dog researchers at NSID hope that future refinements of their No More Woof device could communicate complex thoughts with more specific descriptions, such as, "Who is that? He looks nice!"
While that level of sophistication will take some time and a lot of research, the NSID crew is encouraged by the level of interest their crowdfunding effort has attracted: They've exceeded their original funding request of $10,000 by several thousand dollars, and are continuing to attract donations.
If successful, NSID designers hope to ship their first No More Woof prototypes to eager dog owners worldwide by April of this year. But the designers' sights are set much higher: "We believe that within a few years the technologies we are working with will revolutionize our relation to pets and animals," according to the group's IndieGoGo website.
