(Reuters) – A South Korean company has developed an AI-powered dog collar that can detect five emotions in dogs by monitoring their barking using voice recognition technology.
The Petpuls collar can tell pet owners through a smartphone application whether their dogs are happy, relaxed, anxious, angry or sad. It also tracks dogs’ physical activity and rest.
“This device gives a dog a voice so people can understand it,” Andrew Gil, director of global marketing at Petpuls Lab, told Reuters.
The company began collecting different types of bark to analyze dogs’ emotions in 2017. Three years later, they developed their own algorithm based on a database of more than 10,000 samples of 50 dog breeds.
“I thought she was just happy when she was playing and feeling sad and anxious when I was not at home … she actually felt angry when she lost a game she was playing with me, like how people feel,” said Moon Sae-mi. who has a six-year-old Border Collie.
According to the National University of Seoul, the collar has an average accuracy rate of 90 percent of emotional recognition, which tested the device, which according to the company becomes the first of its kind powered by AI voice recognition technology.
Petpuls Lab marketed the collar online at $ 99 in October last year.
The global pet care market was worth $ 138 billion in 2020, up 34 percent, Euromonitor data showed as more people spent time with their pets or pets during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global dog population also grew by 18% to 489 million in the same year.
“More people have started adopting dogs, but unfortunately some of them have abandoned their dogs due to incorrect communication,” Gil said. “Pet pulse can play an important role in the pandemic … it helps owners understand how dogs feel and increases their bonding.”
Reporting by Minwoo Park and Daewoung Kim; Edited by Jacqueline Wong