Puppy Surveillance as New Tech Lets Owners Keep Tabs on Dogs

Ever wanted to know what your pooch gets up to when you’re away, besides  terrorizing the furniture? Petcube is the new gadget that lets you do just that.

Petcube image

It can be a lonely life for a dog with a working owner. They go to work while the dog is left at home alone with just a bowl of food, a dish of water and the comfort of their basket to keep them company. But that’s what we assume our canines get up to whist we’re away. On the days you come home to shredded couches, or wonder just why there are heaps of dog food smattered all over the kitchen floor, wouldn’t it be nice to know just how those things occurred? That was hard to do without a dog-sitter before, but now, pet surveillance device ‘Petcube’ makes it a possibility.

Called Petcube because the gadget is just that, a cube, this technology was originally created after the man behind it, Ben Jacobs, experienced the tragedy of losing his dog, a German Shepherd called Bear, to illness. Jacobs says that the health issues of his beloved pooch were entirely unexpected and so now he has invented Petcube which provides stats on everything from the dog’s normal behaviour to how their health is doing.

How this works is that you fix a collar to your dog’s neck and this does all of the work for you. Including an activity tracker that contains an accelerometer, collected data is sent via Wi-Fi to the servers of Whistle, the company Jacobs set up to make Petcube a reality. This info is then analysed and can bed fed back to you, letting you know if your dog is acting out of the ordinary, perhaps indicating illness. The stats can even be sent right over to your dog’s vet.

There’s an app for your phone too and Jacobs says that another function of the device is that “[Petcube] can know if your dog went for a walk or played in the park, and you can see that activity in an fun timeline-like format on your mobile phone”, meaning that whether you want to keep your dog healthy, happy or both, Petcube will be able to help you out.

You can visit Petcube’s website here.

Source:  BBC

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