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Comment by turkeysandwich | Hacker News Reader

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.

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