Woof! GreenGoose’s Dog-Focused Wireless Sensors Now Available for Order.
Do you already track your own health using apps, GPS, Wi-Fi scales and wearable devices? Well, perhaps after the “quantified self” comes the quantified dog. Really!
The first product from GreenGoose, a start-up that makes wireless sensors for personal tracking, is a $49 kit of dog-focused sensors to monitor walking, playing, feeding and rewarding your pets.
The San Francisco company started taking orders on Thursday, promising to ship the doggie sensors in January.
GreenGoose’s sensors measure a pet’s movement, and communicate with a base station plugged into a user’s home wireless router. The sensors come in the form of stickers, tags and cards, and contain batteries estimated to last up to a year.
So, for instance, GreenGoose’s dog-walk measurements come from a tag that can be attached to the handle of a dog leash. The sensor keeps track of whenever the leash is used, and sends a summary of the walk when the owner comes back into range. The owner can get stats and summaries through a “Petagonia” iPhone app.
“The whole idea is simply making everyday things we do more playful,” said GreenGoose founder Brian Krejcarek, in an email to AllThingsD.
GreenGoose’s next two specialized apps for its sensors include one that discerns whether a toilet seat has been left up or down, and a credit card-shaped one that simply “measures when you get up off your bum and move about.”
“From there, we’ve got about 100 in the design queue,” Krejcarek said, noting that there will also be an open API, so other people can build their own apps, too.
Programmable and wearable hardware is super hot right now, driven in part by the theory that an intelligent and helpful “Internet of things” might emerge, in which every device and all sorts of other things are connected to the network. Another such effort, named Twine, recently raised $436,000 from individual donors on Kickstarter, more than 12 times as much money as it was seeking.
For its part, GreenGoose also raised $500,000 earlier this year from angel investors.
