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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

Among people with epilepsy or who have children with epilepsy, its pretty common to hear discussion about 'seizure dogs'. These are either pets or specifically trained dogs that can predict when a seizure is going to happen, sometimes up to an hour before. They are somewhat rare but certainly a known phenomenon.

Apparently the training is a bit hit and miss, some dogs can do it and some can't. Training a dog to react to a seizure that is actually happening right now is quite a lot easier, and still very useful (e.g. train it to run to parents room, barking).

edit: also, one hears of scams where people claim to be able to provide seizure dogs but dont, so bear that in mind.

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> Training a dog to react to a seizure that is actually happening right now is quite a lot easier, and still very useful

Aye especially where the dog puts their body between the seizing patient and the floor preventing serious head injuries. You can see the training here https://youtu.be/ZskqSLnMDRQ

Also, postictal sucks. Really, really, really sucks. It's one of those things words can't do it justice. Wikipedia says "it is characterized by drowsiness, confusion, nausea, hypertension, headache or migraine, and other disorienting symptoms... often accompanied by amnesia or other memory defects". Having a trusted friend (like your dog) next to you during is very, very helpful.

Yeah... that website is a scam.

Seizure alert dogs have not been established to be effective yet. A claim of "100% reliable" is guaranteed to be woo.

I have heard of scams in this area so you might be right. I removed the link. I believe that such dogs do exist, but they are rare.

i believe dogs can sense a lot on their owners. that doesn't mean it's by smell though. people just pin it on smell often as dogs nose is very good. that doesn't mean it's the only sensor they have.

Exactly. For example, the person could be emitting an extremely high-pitched tone before the seizure that is inaudible to the Human ear yet can be heard by the dog. Sort of like a camera flashbulb.

Possibly, but I feel behavior is probably the biggest tell for dogs.

Their owner starts acting funny right before a seizure comes on.

I have a tendency to let frustration build up until I lose my temper. The issue is that I don't realize I'm doing it until I'm ready to explode. My last dog was so sensitive to that, that she could tell when I was starting to get angry before I would realize it. I would be sitting at my computer, struggling with something, and I'd feel her poke me in the leg with her nose, then I knew it was time to take a break. I think she could hear that i was typing 'harder' when I got angry, but it could have been any one of a lot of tiny signals. Point is, she was consistently aware of me getting angry before I was. I miss that dog...

> I believe that such dogs do exist, but they are rare.

it may as well be that every dog senses it, and it is our ability to communicate with and understand the dog rarely reaches the level necessary for the information to be actually communicated.

if there was a smell it would be easily detectible by humans using apparatus they have for such things as it would mean something of physical nature was traveling from these individuals into their surroundings...

I'm confused. TFA says "all dogs succeeded in each trial", and while there may have not been a lot of trials, that still sounds like grounds to believe it wasn't by coincidence.

I don't see how the fact that they didn't use a machine to smell negates their findings. Do you believe that every single time the dogs were correct was purely coincidental? Or do you believe that there's some other thing emanating from a tin containing the body odor of a person with epilepsy? I don't understand what your explanation for the results is

We use dogs in many roles due to their sense of smell. Police work, customs and border control, search and rescue etc. Using an apparatus isn’t a good substitute yet.

detecting and identifying trace molecules in air is not at all easy. there are some very specific detectors that work well, but nothing like a general electronic nose.

How do you even begin to reinforcement train a behavior you don’t understand the trigger for? That sounds fascinating!

I can understand how to train a dog if I know “Ok this person is having a seizure in X minutes, time to cue the dog”

But when you don’t know? Would you need an existing trained dog to bootstrap with? Who trained the first one?

Presumably this effect was first noticed without any training, when dogs who'd witnessed their owners having seizures made the connection and started to get agitated when another was imminent.

> More specifically, the training for SAD required three main steps. First a positive association is created between the scent of a seizure and treats in order to induce a conditioned emotional response.

The paper goes into a bit of detail on training, but it's a fair and interesting point: How do they get the seizure scent? I guess you could maybe take a sample just after a seizure, or a second person could do it if they were present and prepared to take it.

I imagine you train them to react to seizures, and they figure the predictive bit out themselves, if they are able to.

How do you rule out the possibility that dogs cause seizures?

The patient already had seizures before getting a seizure dog.

Stimulus generalization comes to mind. IIRC Pavlows dogs at some point reacted not just to the food, but even earlier on him entering the room.

I doubt that they train dogs like "Steve's having a seizure. Good! Get that dog here."

I imagine that you do a preliminary training with faked seizures to get responses right and then hope (meaning: Train under real conditions) that the dog will react on a real seizure as well.

There is a scent, I believe it is a hormone but I don’t think it is what the body actually produces. If a dog reacts to it they can try to train it. If it doesn’t, they train the dog for something else or find it a good home. They also have people fake seizures. You can probably find some YouTube videos of it.

We have a dog that could do it. She could warn us about my partner’s seizures and fainting a few minutes before it happened. She could fetch help and apply pressure to the abdomen. (I say could because my partner had surgery a year ago and hasn’t had any seizures or fainting since then.)

I definitely noticed a change in my partner before seizures (but not fainting). The dog alerted on me once during a moment of high anxiety. I wouldn’t begin to argue WHAT the dog is actually reacting to, but the training methods people are using seem to work.

I wonder if the fake seizures confuse the dogs about what signs to look for... Might be a quantity over quality problem though (how would you train enough dogs without faking it?)

I’m not an expert on this so I’m just guessing but I think the fake seizures are more for training what to do during the seizure rather than the detection part.

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