Moreno Escobar Jesús Jaime, Morales Matamoros Oswaldo, Aguilar Del Villar Erika Yolanda, Tejeida Padilla Ricardo, Lina Reyes Ixchel, Espinoza Zambrano Brenda, Luna Gómez Brandon David, Calderón Morfín Víctor Hugo
Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, 07340 Ciudad de México, Mexico.
Escuela Superior de Turismo, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, 07630 Ciudad de México, Mexico.
Animals (Basel). 2021 Feb 6;11(2):417. doi: 10.3390/ani11020417.
Dolphin-Assisted Therapies (DAT) are alternative therapies aimed to reduce anxiety levels, stress relief and physical benefits. This paper is focused on measuring and analyzing dolphins brain activity when DAT is taking place in order to identify if there is any differences in female dolphin's neuronal signal when it is interacting with control or intervention subjects, performing our research in Delfiniti, Ixtapa, Mexico facilities. We designed a wireless and portable electroencephalographic single-channel signal capture sensor to acquire and monitor the brain activity of a female bottle-nose dolphin. This EEG sensor was able to show that dolphin activity at rest is characterized by high spectral power at slow-frequencies bands. When the dolphin participated in DAT, a 23.53% increment in the 12-30 Hz frequency band was observed, but this only occurred for patients with some disease or disorder, given that 0.5-4 Hz band keeps it at 17.91% when there is a control patient. Regarding the fractal or Self-Affine Analysis, we found for all samples studied that at the beginning the dolphin's brain activity behaved as a self-affine fractal described by a power-law until the fluctuations of voltage reached the crossovers, and after the crossovers these fluctuations left this scaling behavior. Hence, our findings validate the hypothesis that the participation in a DAT of a Patient with a certain disease or disorder modifies the usual behavior of a female bottle-nose dolphin.
海豚辅助疗法（DAT）是旨在降低焦虑水平、缓解压力并带来身体益处的替代疗法。本文聚焦于在海豚辅助疗法进行时测量和分析海豚的大脑活动，以确定雌性海豚在与对照或干预对象互动时其神经元信号是否存在差异，我们在墨西哥伊斯塔帕的德尔菲尼蒂设施开展此项研究。我们设计了一种无线便携式单通道脑电图信号捕捉传感器，用于采集和监测一只雌性宽吻海豚的大脑活动。该脑电图传感器能够显示，海豚休息时的活动特征是低频段具有较高的频谱功率。当海豚参与海豚辅助疗法时，在12 - 30赫兹频段观察到23.53%的增幅，但这仅发生在患有某些疾病或病症的患者身上，因为当有对照患者时，0.5 - 4赫兹频段保持在17.91%。关于分形或自仿射分析，我们发现对于所有研究样本，起初海豚的大脑活动表现为幂律描述的自仿射分形，直到电压波动达到交叉点，交叉点之后这些波动不再呈现这种标度行为。因此，我们的研究结果验证了这一假设，即患有某种疾病或病症的患者参与海豚辅助疗法会改变雌性宽吻海豚的正常行为。
