1.2 Value Proposition

ColCat connects cat owners with their cats remotely and helps them better understand cat’s health conditions giving them peace of mind that their cats are happy and healthy while they are away.

2. Motivation

According to our research, people tend to adopt pets during the pandemic. However, as many pet owners begin returning to the office and school, there is a rise in pet owners' anxieties about leaving pets home alone.

Our team decided to focus on this area and create an IoT solution to help with the problems that cat owners might have. We wanted to develop a product that gives cat owners peace of mind while they are away from their cats. This system will allow cat owners to track major health metrics about their cats and make sure they are doing okay through a smart collar that connects to a mobile application. And, cat owners can also always have a visual to ensure their cats are safe in case of emergencies with the drone camera monitor.

Additionally, we created low fidelity wireframes and high fidelity mockups, then we tested different components of our ColCat system through 4 user enactments to make sure everything works well together.

Throughout the use of various research methods, we identified the following pain points and major design opportunities:

1. Cat owners are very curious about cat behaviors when they are home alone.

2. Cat owners tend to worry about the cats' safety and negative emotions.

3. Cat owners want an effective tool to detect the health conditions of their cats. Lastly,

4. Cat owners are interested in monitoring or talking to their cats remotely, they also want to receive important notifications regarding the cat's conditions

4. Final system concept

We designed 4 major features for ColCat

1. Collar will collect key health metrics from the cat automatically, report to the mobile App, and senses abnormalities

• • For example, with the sensors, ColCat Collar can track the heart rate, meal times, body temperature, activeness, location, sleep time, etc.

2. Mobile application allows users to view cat health reports, receive alerts, and control connected IoT devices

• • The mobile app is free to use and it'll give cat owners additional insights and clear visual information regarding the health conditions of their cat in real-time. It also serves as the notification hub where cat owners can receive immediate alerts about any abnormalities and respond to the alerts quickly.

3. Connect with Vet

• • When cat owners receive abnormalities alerts about the cat, they can choose to send those health metrics tracked by the system directly to the vet within the Vet Chat panel. ColCat makes connecting with vets easier for cat owners.

4. Autopilot Drone Camera with a laser pen

• • The Drone Camera that arrives with the ColCat Collar is a part of the system that you can activate with the mobile app.

6. Prototype shots and the key features you prototype

Final digital prototype key features:

1. Track cat's health and activity metrics

2. Receive alerts

3. Connect with the local vet over the app and share health metrics that were collected by the collar to the vet directly

4. Control laser pen on the drone camera

5. Look for health tips

Final physical prototype key features:

• We used light color-changing (which is a custom-coded NeoPixel photon component ) to represent the different health statuses of the cat. For example, when the light is deep blue, it means the cat's body temperature is low.

• We used the NeoPixel for the Cat Collar to represent the sensor notifications when metrics are abnormal. We used C++, JavaScript, and HTML to do this. We set up five functions in a .ino file to change the color of the NeoPixel ring to white, red, blue, and green.

• To perform these color changes during the demo, we created HTML buttons for each color and used jQuery to integrate the buttons with the respective color functions. We also utilized the color black as an easy way to turn the NeoPixel off. This allowed us to click the button of the color we wanted to display on the collar for each given scenario. We utilized all the pixels in the NeoPixel with the same color so that the message is clear to the user and the light indicator is easy to interpret.

• We used the drone camera and a laser pen to mimic the capabilities of our ColCat drone monitor.

8. Reflection

Limitation of your design

• Due to technology limitations, the Emotion Sensors, which could be a feature of our ColCat system, have not been fulfilled yet.

• We did not create the Devices and Inbox pages of the app due to the time constraints and that they were not the core features we want to present during the final demo

• We did not demo some of the error prevention mechanisms of our collar due to the time limitation. We could've added scenes to explain what how the battery replacement task works, what happens if the cat breaks the collar, and what if the collar gets disconnected from the home wifi.

Next Steps

Due to the time constraints, we could not fulfill all the features we want to integrate with the ColCat system. In our vision, ColCat is also the central hub for all the smart home devices owners purchased for their cat, for example, smart cat feeder, smart water fountain, smart cat litter box, and additional home security cameras.

For our next steps,

1. We would like to ideate on those new ideas and see how they can potentially work with the ColCat app and help owners better understand their cat's behaviors and health conditions while home alone.

2. We would also like to conduct more user testings with our current prototyping set and find out what we might have overlooked by observing the participants.

3. We would also want to explore the accessibility side of our IoT design and make sure the final product can reach a broad and more diversified user market.

4. Without technology limitations, we would like to add more customization for users, for example, users can edit and modify the light colors indications.

New Insights

1. Being familiar with the current technologies and the limitation of each will be helpful for prototyping more efficiently. Coding skill is always helpful for IoT prototype, as the physical parts of the product normally involve hand-coding.

2. After the demo showcasing and revisiting all of our interactions through the video production. We noticed that we could further polish some high fi prototype user interfaces and we can also design a few more screens to make the interaction transition to be more smooth.