PawSense

PawSense: Sharing Rescue Dog’s Physiological States to Encourage Adoption

Pet dogs within households have become an increasingly popular solution for additional companionship, better mental health, and even education on responsibility. Besides purchasing them from pet shops, a more noble and highly encouraged approach would be to adopt them instead. However, the adoption rate is still very low for various reasons, such as poor exposure, the shelter being inconvenient to reach, and so on.
To that end, we propose PawSense, a platform that allows potential adopters to feel more connected to rescue dogs by seeing the rescue dog’s physiological state in real-time. Each rescue dog is equipped with a custom harness that has a heart rate sensor attached to it. The heart rate sensor broadcasts the dog’s heart rate to a cloud server, allowing the adopter to view them on the website or mobile application in real-time and feel more connected to them as living beings. From our experiment, we found remote users feel more emotionally connected and are able to better empathize with the dogs.