Why is he whimpering and yelping?
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 by Roberto SaraccoNot talking about your little kid (kids whimper but they don’t yelp, do they?) but about your dog. Well now Fujitsu is coming to your help.
They have just announced the development of a device that can be attached to the dog’s collar to monitor several parameters to measure their level of activity and possibly some signs of sickness.
In the announcement they say the device will be made available in the second half of 2012 and will provide connectivity to a cloud. People (not the dog, indirect biz model!) will subscribe to a service and I can easily imagine that one may subscribe to different levels of services, depending on what kind of data analyses you want.
The service has been demonstrated at the Fujitsu Forum on May 17 and 18 in Tokyo. The device embeds a number of sensors and accumulates data. Using your cell phone (with FeliCa feature, widely available in Japanese cell phones, since it is used for mobile payment) you get the data from the collar and they are automatically transferred to the cloud.
Through a dedicated web page you can look at data as they are interpreted by a number of applications, in part coming with the service but, I guess, in part acquired by you through third party offering. It is an example of open data and leveraging them.
What I find interesting is the fact that this may create a very interesting test bed for trying health applications leveraging on data without all the hassle one has to face when dealing with human data. Clearly the dog is not as sensitive as we might be about revealing his whereabouts and physiological data.
The success in this “dog” market may stimulate applications focussing on human health. Don’t underestimate the potential for success. The Bowlingual system (a cell phone embedded in the dog’s collar that detects the dog’s mood and translate that into sentences -up to 200 different emotions) had a significant success in Japan!
Tags: health care, sensor