Context awareness
Integrating GPS onto a wearable for animals is not new. Geo tagging and similar technologies are used by scientists/wildlife enthusiasts to study the movements of animals based on their location. Wagr focuses on monitoring a dog’s activities first, while GPS location tracking is just one of its many metrics leveraged for analytics.
The real differentiation came in when the system got incorporated with a 3-axis gyroscope and 3-axis accelerometer during its development phase more than a year ago. As gyroscope uses Earth’s gravity to help determine orientation, it gives orientation of movement of the pet dog. The accelerometer gives non-gravitational acceleration data whenever the dog walks or runs.
Software and analytics
The software, which is the soul of Wagr, has two parts. One runs on the smartphone and the other on the server-side analytics platform. Wagr utilises its smartphone application to co-ordinate with the wearable by syncing with it. The wearable sends data to the application, and the application talks to the server for feedback. You get graphs or reports on the smartphone screen just like an end-user report or a dashboard.
Analytics shows up patterns and dashboard primarily using inputs given by dog behaviourists and trainers, which are fed into the prebuilt evaluation measures in the database. The latter are updated every time a new behaviour or a subsequent change is seen by experts who know the dog’s psychology.
