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Group 4 IoT Project
- Motivation
After the research and ideation processes, we decided to help pet owners deal with their anxiety and their pet's anxiety when leaving their pets at home by themselves during the COVID pandemic when everyone is returning back to the office.
According to current research, people tend to adopt pets during the pandemic. Demand for pets surged. Americans, working from home or furloughed, sought out animal companionship. More than 30% of owners have sought advice from veterinarians on making the transition to in-person work easier for their pets, according to a March survey from Banfield Pet Hospital. Upon returning to the office, 68% of Generation Z owners and 42% of millennials plan to hire dog walkers or reserve spots in doggy daycares. However, pet care is not cheap. Around 20% of owners are considering finding another home for their pets if they cannot bring them into the office, the survey found.
Therefore, we decided to focus on this area and create an IoT solution to help with the problems pet owners might have. The following research and ideation processes will show how we shaped and refined our scope and concepts to the current one.
2. Ideation Process
2. Ideation Process
2. Methodology Overview
2. Methodology Overview
Affinity analysis
Zoom Meeting
We imported all 80 ideas to a blank google sheet
Transfer 80 ideas to the Miro whiteboard -> affinity analysis begins
Transfer 80 ideas to the Miro whiteboard -> affinity analysis begins
See our initial 80 ideas below:
3. Selection Process:
3. Selection Process:
Step 01
We generated 80 ideas at high-level and went through our first-round vote: each of us picked our favorite ideas among the 80
We then categorized the ideas that got voted into 6 categories:
Health Monitor
Workout
Public IoT
Smart Home
Sanitation
Others
Step 02
Based on the results for the first-round vote, we made a second-round vote: we specifically selected the 4 best ideas from the six categories
Smart mask
Smart swimming cap
Smart exercise mirror
Smart shopping cart ⭐️
Each of us further brainstormed these four ideas and shared sketches
Step 03
We presented our IoT design ideas in class and collected feedback from peers. We then discussed the feedback during our regular group meeting.
4. Resulting Concepts:
4. Resulting Concepts:
We refined our design scope and selected 3 potential problems we wanted to work on
Pet:
Pets suffer from anxiety/other issues as a result of home alone
Smart home
power consumption is hard to track
Health and Fitness
People want to learn something new/track on their health metrics, but don't have affordable clear instructions/devices
Pet was the winner ⭐️
Selection Metrics:
Researchable
Useful
Practicality
5 - 6. Contextual Inquiry & Results Analysis
5 - 6. Contextual Inquiry & Results Analysis
Each team member reached out to 2-3 potential users (pet owners) who might be experiencing the problem we defined.
Each of us came up with research questions and interviewed the users (up to 30 mins).
Results:
The results of our contextual inquiry yielded that pet owners miss their pets when they are away from home. Sometimes, pet owners want to reconnect with their pets to make sure they are okay or to make sure their pets are stimulated throughout the day. Productivity was another consideration - people are more productive when they can take breaks and play with their pets. This also reduces the anxiety that pet owners feel around leaving their pets behind.
With the preliminary contextual inquiry findings results we collected, each of us created an IoT product sketch that addresses the problem.
After that, we reconvened on Zoom and reported our individual user need findings, and discussed how our unique IoT solution would help users take care of the problem.
We then voted again anonymously and filtered out the 3 best solutions we wanted to continue working on.
Two ideas were similar so we combined them, and here're our top 3 solutions:
1. Camera and microphone at home. A screen as a mobile device that can monitor pet activities/add food for pets/speak to pets etc. When it's not active, it will be a photo frame to show pets' photos.
2. A smart cat collar device that tracks and analyzes your cat's behaviors, like drinking/eating/exercising activities, pet owners can also interact with the cat via telecommunication and a built-in laser pen unit. The device will work better when paired with an in-door monitoring camera.
3. A smart mouse toy that Is connected and remote-controlled via a phone. Users can control where the toy goys while their pets play with It. The toy has a rearview camera, a front view camera, and a wall camera that gives the user multiple perspectives of their pet and surrounding space.
8. Feedback
8. Feedback
We received all sorts of feedback about the original three ideas we presented d ranging from what people preferred out of the three to what questions they had. It was very clear that our smart swim cap idea was very popular. But, as we looked more into it we weren't sure how feasible of an idea that was in the long run so we tried to see what else we could do under the health and fitness trackers umbrella. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that innovation or exploring various ideas may be difficult under this concept since it's such a popular focus of the IoT industry. We thought that IoT for pets would be really interesting to explore and give us room to try our hand at a product that doesn't already exist.
9. State your product scope
9. State your product scope
Population: The product aims to serve users that are anxious/nervous about leaving their pets along whenever they are away from home and unable to take their pets with them
Context: We aim to add some form of automation to the home environment that can be controlled and viewed through the phone of the user so they can see what's
Opportunities
Opportunities
01.
Camera and microphone at home. A screen as a mobile device that can monitor pet activities/add food for pets/speak to pets etc. When it's not active, it will be a photo frame to show pets' photos.
02.
A smart cat collar device that tracks and analyzes your cat's behaviors, like drinking/eating/exercising activities, pet owners can also interact with the cat via telecommunication and a built-in laser pen unit. The device will work better when paired with an in-door monitoring camera.
03.
A smart mouse toy that Is connected and remote-controlled via a phone. Users can control where the toy goys while their pets play with It. The toy has a rearview camera, a front view camera, and a wall camera that gives the user multiple perspectives of their pet and surrounding space.
8. Conclusion
8. Conclusion
We found pet IoT to be an interesting space that might allow for us to be really creative and something that's a bit different from the larger interest in things like health/fitness, plants, etc. For next steps, we definitely want to further hash out the functionality that is useful for this problem scope and narrow the three ideas down to one. We also want to get feedback from the professor and our peers to see if this is a step in the right direction after pre-milestone 1.
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