Gillian Hayes, University of California, Irvine, FitBaby Principal Investigator
As a researcher who focuses on computing systems and their designs and uses, the checkboxes on all my various research oversight forms for preliminary animal research and animal models never made a lot of sense for my work. Two things happened this month, though, that made me rethink the whole idea of animal models for my research.
First, I watched a fascinating PBS documentary about dogs. As a dog-lover, I was keen to learn about the co-evolution of our species, both biologically and sociologically. Dogs are key animal models for research in the standard sense of being good disease models for certain human diseases. Beyond that, however, their evolution and behavior also serve to inform us about human history, migration patterns, the development of societies and more. From this documentary, I also learned the important role that dogs have in acting as “juveniles” in the lives of humans. In other words, we like them in part because they act so much like human children.
That got me thinking about one interesting way I have used my dog in my research lately: as a proxy for a premature infant. I have been debugging our FitBaby application for the last few weeks by logging information about my 9-year-old retriever. When my dog Savannah and I go out for a walk, I log in our application “Took baby for a walk;” when Savannah poops, I log another dirty diaper in the application.
As is to be expected, I have found in our software a lot of little bugs, which we are fixing. What surprised me, however, is how I began to change my behavior. I never sing to my dog. First of all, I am not a great singer, but secondly, it has never occurred to me that she might like it. The little icon on the screen that I am not earning by not singing, however, has a profound effect — one that we planned it to have on parents, who we hope will sing to their babies. I find it taunting me, wanting to be earned, and so I sing to my dog. She actually seems to like it. So, maybe we are on to a new tradition.
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