Skin infections and allergies are common medical issues that can be painful for dogs and frustrating for pet owners. In fact, skin and coat issues are the second most common medical condition dogs in Pet Insight Project deal with, and these issues can have a major impact on a dog’s quality of life.
Because of how common skin and coat issues are, and because of the impact on quality of life, we’ve been hard at work figuring out how to interpret your dog’s scratching and itching patterns with the goal of empowering you with information about your dog’s skin health.
Our investigation into skin and coat health starts with the hypothesis that scratching and licking are reliable indicators of a dermatological issue. But before we can even test this hypothesis, we first needed to figure out how to teach Whistle to detect scratching! After a lot of hard work and with the assistance of thousands of videos submitted by Citizen Scientists all over the country, we’ve successfully learned to detect a variety of different behaviors, including scratching and licking.
But our job still isn’t done yet. We can detect scratching, but we have to test the hypothesis that increased scratching is a reliable signal of a dermatological issue. Thanks to a lot of hard work by our team, we’ve done just that. We’ve been able to prove that both scratching and self-licking are reliable signals of a dermatological issue. Looking at the charts below, it’s clear that seconds per day of scratching and licking both dramatically increase in the days leading up to a diagnosis:
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