PetConnect

The following is an idea I posted yesterday on Quirky.com. You can check out and vote for the full idea here. Please note that I am not a crazy cat lady. Just a dude who loves his cat (singular).

Do you ever sit at work wondering what your cat or dog is doing at home? Or maybe you go away for a weekend and wish you had some reassurance that your cat is eating and drinking properly?

PetConnect will answer those questions. And yes, I’ll say up front that it’s an indulgence. But there aren’t many indulgences that let feel like your pet is communicating with you.

The concept is simple: PetConnect is a kit that comes with a sensor for your pet’s collar and 5 or so other RFID tag stickers to be placed strategically around your home. Put one at your animal’s bed, one at the window, one at their food bowl, and so on. Then just connect to the collar hub via your home’s wireless, and program each of the RFID tag stickers as you’d like. You can choose to connect them to an e-mail, Twitter, or Facebook account you set up for your pet.

When your pet is near one of the RFID tags, the device transmits a signal that prompts the account you set up to send you a pre-programmed message. So you might be sitting at work when you get a tweet from your cat that says, “Hey Mom, I’m sitting at the east window right now.” Or an e-mail that says, “Hey Dad, I’m eating and loving it!” In case you have a particularly active animal, you could limit the number of messages sent per day.

PetConnect. The future of weird pet-owner relationships.

6 thoughts on “PetConnect”

  1. It’s good, it needs more though. She’s already on Facebook so the updates would be great if they could be linked to her account. I like the idea of her being able to Tweet what’s going on. I want cameras where the tags are,I want youtube videos of what the cameras see as well as what the sensor on her collar would see. I want the sensor on my sweetheart’s collar to tell when she’s near one of the other pets. When I come home and she has a random scratch/bite on her, I want to know which animal did it. When I come home and her food is empty, I want to know which bully ate it. If I have to leave her in a pet hotel, I want to be absolutely sure she was given her medicine as scheduled and it wasn’t missed. This would be a perfect thing for me, I am that weird pet-owner of the future.
    Looking at everything I just said, she’s probably lucky her collar only has a small charm and a little bell on it.

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  2. If Biddy gets a Twitter account I will need to intervene…..

    When I had a dog I already knew the minute the garage door closed he was like “Whoo hoo!!! They’re finally gone!!!”” and he went and stretched out on the couch which he wasn’t allowed on to sleep…..

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