Pet owners are also benefiting from wearable technology: they can register their dogs with the aid of RFID chips, and GPS trackers quickly help to find a runaway pet.
It’s something that can happen to any pet owner: in a moment of inattention, the house cat slips out through the gap in the door, or the dog is suddenly chasing off into the distance. If a beloved pet cannot be recovered, it’s a tragedy for all concerned. Animal protection organisation Tasso e.V. helped return almost 60,500 dogs and cats to their owners in 2015 alone. The organisation holds the largest central register of pets.
Unique identification
Tasso has been employing wearable technology to track lost pets for a number of years. A small transponder is injected under the animal’s skin as part of the registration process. The unit is a biopolymer or glass capsule containing a copper coil and a microchip. The copper coil acts as an antenna, activated for fractions of a second by radio waves when a scanner is held close to the location. The microchip holds the unique number of the transponder, which can be read via the antenna to identify the animal. The system has one disadvantage, however: the pet must first be found before it can be identified and returned to its owner.
GPS tracking
One solution is a GPS tracker attached to the animal’s collar. The smallest tracker, according to the manufacturer’s specification, is the petpointer from HergTech, which is just 14 square centimetres in size. Its GPS chip uses three satellite systems to track objects to within just a few metres in over 220 countries. Trackers use the mobile communications network to transfer the position data to the pet owner’s smartphone or PC from a built-in SIM card. The petpointer transmits the GPS positions at user-selectable intervals which can be changed at any time in an app.
Many trackers additionally feature Geofencing, which issues an alert if the pet moves out of a pre-defined area. The GPS tracker from Tractive offers another interesting feature: a digital light switch in the mobile app enables the pet owner to turn a light on the GPS unit on and off. This helps when searching for the pet in the dark, as well as enhancing safety when it is close to a road.
(picture credits: Fotolia: grafikplusfoto)