DogPhone lets pets video call their owners
Away from home, dog owners can use technology to talk to their pets, track their every movement, launch projectile treats into the air and even spy on them while they’re sleeping.
Dogs themselves can’t do much more than watch longingly out the window. Maybe that’s why the possibility of a “DogPhone” briefly entranced the media world. Who wouldn’t want to take that call?
But the new research that inspired those stories, led by Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, an assistant professor at the University of Glasgow, was mostly aspirational.
The study involved only one dog. The device was not an actual phone, nor is anything of the kind close to market. And the results were, at best, inconclusive.
Using a ball equipped with a motiondetecting device that triggers video calling, Hirskyj-Douglas, whose specialty is animal-computer interaction, gave her 10-year-old Labrador retriever, Zack, the power to call her by just moving his toy.
“I thought something like this could help dogs in some way to have more control and have choices,” she said in an interview. “We decide so much of their lives that maybe having this choice alone is kind of exciting in itself.”
The research, published in November in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, took place over the course of 16 days, with variations in the sensitivity of the device.
Zack was not trained to use the so-called
DogPhone, the researchers said.
During the experiment, Zack called Hirskyj-Douglas about five times a day and more than 50 times in all. Almost all of the calls appeared to have been made by accident, the study said.
A leading animal behaviourist, Patricia McConnell, was sceptical about the study.
“A sample of one — one person and one dog — does not a study make,” she said, “and I wish there had been more effort to train the dog to use the device instead of hoping he’d figure it out.”
Hirskyj-Douglas said that although her research did not reveal what Zack meant to do, it demonstrated that dogs could use an interactive digital device such as hers, if they are given the option.
“They don’t always have to be these passive users of technology that we’re making, and yet all technology that mostly comes out is passive usage,” she said, adding that her research “showed the future of dog technology can be very different from what it currently is.”
The pet surveillance business is booming. As products with cameras, speakers and GPS devices have proliferated, an increasing number of pet owners are turning to devices that let them be with their pets, even when they’re not physically in the room.
In 2020, the pet tech market value topped $5.5 billion, according to an industry report by the research firm Global Market Insights, which projects that the market will swell to more than $20 billion by 2027. Top-selling products include collars and toys equipped with GPS trackers.
Hirskyj-Douglas said that technology such as her device, which was not developed for sale, could potentially help assuage isolation and separation anxiety in pets — a problem that many pet owners have noted over the course of the coronavirus pandemic.