ARUN RATH, HOST:
Google announced this week that they're ending individual sales of the much celebrated and maligned Google Glass. But wearable tech is not dead. In fact, there's an amazing new vest that has GPS, can call 911 and talk back like Siri. Only it's not for people. It's for service dogs. It's the brainchild of a group called the FIDO Project, headed up by Dr. Melody Jackson. She's director of the Center for BioInterface Research at Georgia Tech. Jackson and her colleagues want to dramatically expand what service dogs can currently do.
MELODY JACKSON: I have a colleague who is blind and has a guide dog. And he was on the Georgia Tech campus one day when his dog stopped, as they're trained to do if there's something in their path. Well, he knew that there was nothing that should be in their path, so he pulled out his collapsible cane and he felt around to see if there - something was on the sidewalk. He didn't feel anything. And so he said, come on, buddy, let's go. And the dog refused. So he thought, well, maybe he's just being a dog. He gave him a little correction, saying let's go. And the dog said all right, and they both stepped into wet cement. So if the dog could have said we need to go around something that you can't feel with your cane, it could've saved them a very dangerous and certainly inconvenient situation.
RATH: So tell me about the FIDO vest that you've designed. Describe it first.
JACKSON: Well, the FIDO vest - FIDO stands for Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations - and essentially we're putting technology to wearable clothing for dogs. So we have sensors that dogs can activate with natural dog abilities such as holding in the mouth, biting, tugging or just touching with their nose.
RATH: And you have the vest with you in the studio, right?
JACKSON: Absolutely, I do. And I have a little scenario if you don't mind.
RATH: Please.
JACKSON: Medical alert dogs perform vital functions. For example, an epilepsy alert dog will detect, before the person even knows it, that they're about to have a seizure. And what they're trained to do is to push the person up against a wall so that they don't just fall down, that they might slide down the wall. And then once the person is having the seizure and they might be unconscious, the dog licks their face to arouse them. But what if the dog could activate a tug sensor to dial 911 and summon help that might sound like this...?
COMPUTER-GENERATED SPEECH: Excuse me, my owner needs your attention.
RATH: Well, could you talk about some of the other applications of this because situations like search and rescue - there are dogs at work with the police and the military. I've got to assume there are a lot of other applications beyond the medical service dogs.
JACKSON: Absolutely, and we keep finding more just about on a daily basis. A scenario that happened about three months ago in Georgia - we had a young man, a teenager, that was lost in the North Georgia mountains who was on the autism spectrum. And every time the dogs would find him, he would run away. So what happens with the search and rescue dog typically is they'll find the target. Then they have to re-find their handler, and then they have to re-find the target again. Well, every time the dogs got close, the young man would run away because he was afraid. But what if the dog could stay with the person that they found, activate a sensor on their vest that would geolocate and send a message to the search and rescue handler that says, hey, I found the person, and I'm going to stay with them?
Bomb-sniffing dogs have the ability to tell what explosive they have found, so is it C4, which is relatively stable and not going to explode if you bump it, or is it a very volatile substance such as TATP, which, pretty much, you can breathe on it and it'll explode? The bomb squad probably would like to know that. The dog does know it. And so we're working right now with the Georgia Tech police to implement some systems that will allow the dogs to tell us exactly what explosive they've found.
RATH: Dr. Melody Jackson is the director of the Center for BioInterface Research at Georgia Tech, and she's also the founder of the FIDO project. Dr. Jackson, thank you.
JACKSON: Thank you so much.
RATH: This is NPR News.