Israeli Jailers Ask Dogs for Breakout Clues

When I first heard about an Israeli security system that supposedly translates dog barks into alarms, I thought: no freakin' way is this real.

But, according to the AP, Israeli jails truly are "using a custom-built computer program" from Petach Tikva's Bio-Sense Technologies to "interpret the barks of guard dogs and distinguish warnings of a breakout from everyday woofs." Go figure.

The Israel Prison Service has long used dogs to patrol its fences. But "the dogs would bark, and staff of the prison wouldn't hear it, or would hear it and would not take action fast enough." Noam Tavor, head of the Service's canine unit, said.

Bio-Sense developed a sensor that can determine a dog's stress based on the sound of its bark. The sensor can be placed within a 15 yard radius of the dog to detect the "emergency barks" and sound an alarm in the prison's control room...

Bio-Sense recorded the patrol dogs barking in different situations, from playtime to cat encounters to real emergencies. They loaded thousands of these recordings into a computer program to determine
"what makes the emergency bark different than the other barks," said
Bio-Sense project manager Orit Netz...

The first system was put in place in 2005, and since then three more have been installed in Israeli prisons. Bio-Sense now has more than 100
clients in Israel, including farmers who need protection against theft, Netz said.

(Woof! Pagey; Photo: ERV)