Sayali Junagade, Sripriya Ganta, Leela Krishna Chawan, and Vivek Kant
The relationship between a dog and its owner is built on trust, communication and companionship, making it essential for both their well-being. Strengthening this bond improves a dog’s behaviour, emotional health and overall happiness while also enhancing the owner’s companionship experience and responsibility. We identified an intervention point in the relationship between the dog and its owner, with a focus on comprehending the dog’s feelings.
The primary aim of this project was to enhance dog-human relationships by considering the entire ecosystem of the dog and the human bond. The project created a synthesis map from a detailed study of the dog-human relationships from existing literature and presents an intervention in the form of a smart vest for health, behaviour, and emotion monitoring of the dog. Making these analytics explicit will help humans to understand the dog’s physical and emotional well-being, and thus bond better. Further, we identified different stakeholders, focused on understanding dogs’ behaviour, cognition, perceptions, life cycle and how they influence humans. We tried to understand how the interactions between the dog and their owners are taking place. Through Giga mapping, we understood how the overall data is interconnected and the relationships between the various points that are connected, as well as not directly connected to each other. We then focused on key problems that required intervention to create a meaningful impact on the entire system. After finding areas that need to be studied in the whole system, we zoomed in on each topic further and found out the problems and potentials marked at each point.
A leverage point with high potential opportunities and minimum intervention was identified by ideating solutions at each point and analysing the impacts on the system. After assessing the costs and effects of each solution, we arrived at a less expensive solution that had a significant influence on the behaviour of the entire system. Through this process, we designed a smart vest for military and soldier dogs, a device that improves communication, tracks performance and health monitoring, and helps owners better understand their dog’s behaviour. It also helps to fortify the relationship between working dogs and their handlers. The insights from the gigamap indicate the possibilities for future interventions in this area beyond the ones we have created for enhancing dog-human relationships.
KEYWORDS: wearable technology, smart vest, health and behavioural analysis, system intervention
