Dogs Trained To Sniff Out Post-Traumatic Stress With 90% Accuracy
Two dogs have been trained to sniff out post-traumatic stress by smelling survivors’ breath—with an accuracy success rate following initial training of 90%. In the pilot study, the team taught two of 25 dogs to decipher the breath of people who had been reminded of traumas - a Golden Retriever named Ivy and a German Shepherd-Belgian Malinois mix named Callie. Dr. Sherry Stewart’s clinical psychology lab at Dalhousie University, collaborating with Dr. Simon Gadbois’ canine olfaction lab, recruited 26 people as scent donors, and the dogs were presented with samples, one at a time, to see if they could still accurately detect the stress VOCs. In the second experiment, Ivy achieved 74% accuracy while Callie achieved 81%. Following the proof-of-concept study that included 40 sample sets, the team will attempt to validate the results with larger sample sizes.
