Abstract
The billion dollars’ worth pet industry is catching up on the wearables market, as pet activity and location trackers are increasingly worn by our furry friends. While there is a growing body of work on user perceptions of human wearables, very few works have thus far addressed canine activity trackers and their impact on pet owners’ lifestyles and the human-animal bond. In this paper we report on an empirical study investigating perceptions of 81 users of a popular dog activity tracker. The results show that dog activity trackers are perceived to have positive impact on owners' motivation to increase their mutual physical activities with their dogs. The human-dog bond is perceived to be further reinforced by the use of activity trackers, increasing human awareness to animals’ needs by giving them a “digital voice,” and potentially improving the quality of human caregiving.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 35-43 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Computer |
Volume | 52 |
Issue number | 9 |
Early online date | 23 Aug 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Sept 2019 |