A new research project at the University of East London has found that artificial intelligence could be a useful tool for service dog trainers. While it can’t help with actually training the puppies, it can analyze their behavior to tell if they’ll succeed as a service dog, sometimes even better than their human trainers.
For the project, the trainers who spent the most time with each puppy completed detailed questionnaires about their behavior twice during their training — once at six months and again at 12 months. The AI then looked at the information to pick out early signs of suitability, or non-suitability, for service dog work. It was able to detect behavior patterns that even experienced trainers sometimes miss, and it had an overall prediction accuracy of 80 percent during a 12-month period.
“One of the biggest challenges in assistance dog training is the emotional and financial cost of late-stage failure,” said Mohammad Amirhosseini, associate professor in computer science and digital technologies at the University of East London. “This is more than a tech innovation — it’s a leap forward for animal welfare.”
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