A fitbit for your dog allowing owners to keep track of their best friend's health and ensure they are getting enough activity throughout the day. Set goals and track progress.
Team
Just me
Indie Hacker
Type
This is a concept I created for a dog activity tracker that is managed with your mobile device.
It was my grad project for my year at Vancouver Film School, receiving awards for Best User Experience, Best Graduate Project, a feature in Applied Arts magazine as well as the Behance interactive collection .
There are a number of problems associated with monitoring pet health, some of which include:
To get a better understanding of the problem space, I kicked off my research by talking to potential users. I used SurveyMonkey to build out a list of questions to ask pet owners and took to Reddit and other platforms to spark a discussion with respondents.
193 respondents and various threads helped to identify the key problems owners faced with managing their dog's health and activity.
Responses included:
“Organizing walk schedule around our schedule”
“Managing her routine with others in my household.”
“Keeping to the exercise schedule when busy and/or tired.”
“Coordinating care throughout family.”
"Finding time for walks"
"Co-ordinating care with other family members."
In addition to the survey, I met with local vetrinarians to get their perspective of what impacts a dog's health and how it could be measured more effectively by their owners.
One of the key insights from these discussions is the use of something called the Body Condition Score (BCS). It's a system that vets will use to gauge a dog's health. As there is no standard activity goal for each breed as there is for humans, vets will use the BCS to evaluate fat mass in dogs.
It is the most common indirect method to evaluate the body fat accumulation of pets based on visual obersation and palpation.
At this point it was clear the BCS was going to be a main function of the Fetch system.
