Improving the Welfare of Kennelled Dogs with Smart Kennels
The project investigated whether advances in ubiquitous computing to enhance human wellbeing and daily experience might offer the opportunity to improve how the welfare of kenneled dogs is managed: whether ubiquitous sensor systems and ambient intelligence developed to monitor health in humans (e.g. activity levels, sleeping patterns) might be useful to record, measure, visualize and interpret non-obvious welfare-relevant phenomena, especially when it is non-viable or non-desirable for individual dogs to receive continuous attention; and whether the use of embodied and tangible interaction technologies developed to enhance human performance and experience (e.g. touch or gestural interfaces) might afford the dogs a more stimulating experience and greater control over their surroundings through forms of interaction that are accessible to them.
