Sniffing out disease: Diabetes-alert dogs are on the rise

Article by: ALLIE SHAH , Star Tribune

A dog’s snout is a powerful weapon. So strong, in fact, that pooches trained to smell low blood sugar are being used to manage diabetes.


For 27 years, Sarah Breidenbach had a foolproof way of knowing when her blood sugar level was dangerously low.

Diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a child, she could spot the early warning signs — feeling shaky and anxious.

Then one night, her internal detection system failed. While sleeping, her blood sugar level plummeted, causing a violent seizure that sent her to the hospital. Her body recovered, but her inner monitor did not.

Over the next 18 months, paramedics made 178 trips to her home.

That’s when her doctor prescribed an unusual tool to help manage her diabetes: a dog.

Enter Moxie, a 5-year-old service dog who sits at her St. Paul owner’s side around the clock. The black Labrador can tell when Breidenbach’s blood sugar is too high or too low — just by smelling her breath.

While still rare, diabetes alert dogs are an emerging segment in the larger service dog industry, which for decades has helped people manage such health issues as blindness, hearing impairment and autism. Can Do Canines, a training organization in New Hope, estimates that there are 150 diabetes alert dogs nationwide. Earlier this summer, the group hosted a conference that drew dog trainers from around the world.

“We can’t train as many dogs as we want or as many as are needed,” said Alan Peters, founder of Can Do Canines. Other local trainers include Pawsitive Perspectives Assistance Dogs in Savage and Scent Angels in Eden Prairie.

Using her powerful sniffer, Moxie is able to detect a distinct odor brought on by changes in her owner’s blood sugar. When she smells it, the dog goes into alert mode. She jumps, she whines loudly, she paces and stares directly into Breidenbach’s eyes until her owner relents and checks her blood sugar.

“It’s crazy what they can do,” Breidenbach said of alert dogs like Moxie. “I lost that intuition when I had that insulin reaction, and somehow she’s got it now.”

Dogs show promise, limits

An estimated 23.6 million Americans, or 7.8 percent of the population, have diabetes. Of that number, 10 percent have Type 1 diabetes — the most severe kind. Those who have had the disease for decades can develop “hypoglycemia unawareness,” or the inability to tell when their blood sugar is rapidly dropping, doctors say.

There are electronic monitors to help keep tabs on blood sugar levels. But many diabetics with hypoglycemia unawareness report that their monitors can be late in alerting them. The dogs, they say, let them know very early.

Peters was moved to train diabetes-detecting dogs after a conversation he had that still haunts him. In 1994, he was speaking with a deaf woman with Type 1 diabetes who asked him if her hearing dog could be trained to help her monitor her blood sugar. Peters told the Minneapolis woman he couldn’t help her. He learned later that her blood sugar dropped suddenly one night, causing a grave insulin episode. She died in her sleep.

Dr. Melena Bellin, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Minnesota who studies diabetes, said that while the dogs show promise, there is no scientific evidence yet on their effectiveness. She cautioned against owners relying solely on the dogs as their monitoring tool.

“It is not a substitute for checking blood sugar,” she said.

Bellin is currently working with Can Do Canines and diabetics with alert dogs to study the issue. So far, she said, the dogs appear to be alerting their diabetic owners when their blood sugar was low or dropping fast.

The making of an alert dog – read more on how they train .........

This is such a good idea and the shelters benefit to boot. Hope we get something like this in SA!



Having your dog or cat run away is pretty traumatic. And even if somebody finds your furry friend, they might not know where to find you. If your pet ends up in a shelter, chances are high that it will be euthanized, so Philip Rooyakkers, the CEO of PiP – The Pet Recognition Company, decided to see if he and his team could use facial recognition instead of tags to more easily report and find more lost pets.

PiP launched its Indiegogo campaign today. The company is looking to raise $100,000 in the next month to raise the final funds necessary to bring the app to market.

I ran into Rooyakkers at the GROW conference in Vancouver last week, and he told me that the company’s technology, developed by the image-recognition expert Dr. Daesik Jang, is able to recognize 98 percent of dogs and cats. With the help of some extra metadata (breed, size, weight, gender, colors etc.), this means PiP can recognize virtually every lost pet.

Here is how it works: Pet owners sign up for PiP and upload photos of their pets to the system. The technology then analyzes the pet’s unique facial features and stores the data in its database.

Anybody can download the app to report found pets. Pet owners pay a subscription to PiP (the plan is to charge $1.49 per month, with 2 percent of all proceeds going to local pet rescue charities) and the moment their pet goes missing, PiP will alert local animal control and rescue agencies, veterinarians and social medial outlets.

This “Amber Alert” for missing pets is at the core of what the service does. It will also scan social media for postings about found pets. “We will not only broadcast across all social media that the pet is missing, but everyone with the app (in that locale) will get a pop-up Amber Alert. We will contact the owner directly to listen, provide PiP’s immediate response, and offer support,“ Rooyakkers said in a statement today.

Whenever a pet is found, PiP will use its facial recognition software to see if it can find a match in its system. To avoid false positives, Rooyakkers told me, somebody will always look at the metadata to ensure everything checks out.

Obviously, there are a few other ways to identify lost pets, including ID Tags and microchip implants. However, there are numerous standards for microchips, so not every shelter or clinic can scan every chip. Facial recognition would also allow anybody to scan dogs or cats right after finding them without the need for any special equipment, which should make reuniting them with their owners faster and easier.

Click here to learn more and see the video