Hello to the DIS community. My name is Patrizia Paci
and I am a researcher at the Animal-Computer Interaction Lab at The Open University.
This presentation summarises key information that you can find on the paper: Understanding the
Interaction Between Animals and Wearables: the Wearer Experience of Cats.
The wearable industry offers a variety of animal-attached tags for pet carers who
wish to monitor activities and locations of their cats and dogs. These include devices
that are originally designed to be worn by humans, but that are promoted as suitable
also for pets, and tags that are specifically designed to be worn by animals.
Animal-attached tags are used by people who actively interact with the system's
interface, but are worn by animals who bear them on their bodies.
We argue that human users and animal wearers are two different
kinds of interactors who should equally inform
the design of pet trackers with their requirements, in order to design devices that deliver a
good user experience as well as a good wearer experience.
Product reviews report that important features to consider when purchasing animal-attached
tags are tracking range, accuracy, adds-on sensors, waterproofing, durability, in-build
or existing collar attachment, size, and weight. These considerations primarily reflect the
need of human users to obtain reliable and useful data from hard-wearing devices that
are suitable for the outdoor life of animals, while also reassuring carers that tags are
not too heavy to be worn.
Animal welfare is certainly important for pet carers. Therefore, they are reassured
that tags are animal-friendly, attributing comfortable and ergonomic features to the
tags.
However, the question is: how animal comfortability is established? From information
available, it really seems that the design of comfortability aspects is still up to what
we, as humans, imagine might be comfortable for an animal.
We therefore wanted to investigate the wearer experience of animals
with animals, to see to what extent the
attributes 'comfortable for pets' and 'ergonomically designed', and more generally
'pet-friendly', are based on the actual experience of animals, and then make use of
what we learnt to elicit wearability requirements and design tags that are comfortable from
an animal's perspective.
Our investigation was supported by evidence
in the animal biotelemetry literature, which shows that tags might cause behavioural and
physical impacts that impinge on the animal's life and welfare.
In fact, negative impacts have been described. For example, device components
and attachments may snag in vegetation, meddling with postures (e.g. resting), rub and abrade
skin and fur, disrupt individual or social behaviour such as grooming, and so on.
Thus, it is important that potential impacts produced by the wearer's physical
interaction with the worn device are minimised.
As ACI researchers, our aim is to support the design of technologies that enable
a positive, or at least a non-detrimental experience to animals. But, how can this wearer
experience be assessed and improved?
We propose that designing for good wearability leads to a reduction of the effects
of tagging, thus improving the bodily experience of animal wearers.
Hence, we propose to address the problem of tag impacts through a
wearer-centred design.
Wearability has been defined as the sensory and corporal interaction between
the human body and the wearable device. Hence, designing for wearability means to shape the
wearable in accordance with the body form. We argue that such perspective is relevant
when designing wearables for animals and, by default, wearability should be accounted
for throughout the design process, as it is for human wearables.
On these premises, we argue that to afford good wearability, the design
of animal wearables should primarily reflect the animal wearer's needs, as determined
by their characteristics, activities and living environments. However, this does not appear
to be the case, even for devices that are marketed as animal-friendly and whose function
is to help human guardians caring for the welfare of their animals.
Thus, there is still a need for adequately representing the requirements of animal stakeholders,
for enabling the development of tags that are centred on the animal wearer's
needs,
and for systematising such a prospective wearer-centred design.
We addressed these issues by conducting an observational study on 13 domestic cats,
to investigate their reactions to two popular off-the-shelf GPS devices. The tags that we
evaluated were PawTrax and Tractive. The aim was to, firstly, identify potential discomfort
generated by the devices and, secondly, to establish animal-informed wearability requirements
through systematic observations of the cats' behavioural responses to the tags.
We selected and measured three behaviours among those performed by cats.
They were grooming, scratching and head/body shaking.
These behaviours were chosen because they can be triggered by external stimuli,
like the presence of foreign bodies or irritating factors on the fur or body of a cat.
For example, if fleas bite on a spot of the body, a cat usually scratch that spot
in response. We assumed that, in the same way, if a device irritates the cat's skin,
the cat will scratch in response.
Moreover, these three behaviours are also known to be indicators of stress
in cats.
Firstly, we measured frequency and duration of the three behaviours during three
different experimental conditions, that is: the cats without wearing anything, wearing
the PawTrax device and wearing the Tractive device.
Cats were monitored for 3 non-consecutive days, each day with a different experimental
condition. Secondly, we kept our observations open to any reaction directed towards the
devices such as biting, cuffing, or licking the case.
And we also annotated contextual and species-specific factors linked to the
presence of the device.
For example, interactions with other animals of the household and rubbing behaviour
that could be disrupted by the tag.
These are the quantitative findings for the frequencies of grooming, scratching
and head/body shaking.
Grooming resulted as a behaviour difficult to measure reliably, and difficult
to interpret as device-induced. The statistical analysis confirmed a non-significance. Hence,
we discarded it as an indicator of discomfort.
On the contrary, head/body shaking increased significantly across the three conditions.
This shows that the behaviour could be used as an indicator of discomfort in cats. In
particular, the significance was found between control and PawTrax, and Control and Tractive.
For scratching, the difference across conditions was not statistically significant.
However, cats performed the behaviour in a way that was difficult not to attribute to
discomfort. Hence we analysed it further using qualitative methods because there were interesting
behavioural patterns that could serve for a requirement analysis.
For example, various cats repeatedly scratched one side of the neck and, immediately
after, the other side, when wearing PawTrax.
If we look at the Pawtrax in the bottom
picture, we can see two eyelets in the inner surface of the case. When the device is worn,
these two eyelets are in contact with the cat's neck.
We think that these eyelets might generate a stimulus or exert some pressure,
because various cats scratched one side of the neck and then the other side, very near
to the edges of the case, and they did so only with PawTrax.
Interestingly, the clip that attaches the Tractive case to the collar has a smooth
surface and in fact, with Tractive, cats did not scratch the neck on alternate sides; this
reinforces our hypothesis that the eyelets of the PawTrax might be involved in the scratching
impulse.
These are other relevant reactions and factors that we found through the qualitative
analysis of cats' behaviour. For example, some cats were able to lick, bite and in some
cases even cuff the case of the Tractive device.
This is clear evidence that the protrusion of Tractive was too conspicuous.
On the other hand, the PawTrax's case, which is less protruding than the Tractive's,
was never licked, bitten or cuffed by any cat.
Our observations and the related quantitative and qualitative analysis of cats'
behaviour allowed us to systematically find flaws in the design of the devices and suggest
implications as to which elements could be redesigned to improve the wearability of these
and other devices.
For example, the protrusion of the device should be kept at a minimum,
discontinuities in the inner surface of the collar and case, such as for example
eyelets, should be avoided,
hard material should not be used to encapsulate the electronics, and so on.
In conclusion, there is an imbalance existing between user and wearer requirements,
when the wearers are nonhuman animals.
To help redress this imbalance and design wearables that are truly animal-friendly,
a conscious effort should be made to give animals proper consideration as primary stakeholders
of the devices they wear.
With our study, we proposed to do so through a data-driven approach that showed
how systematic observations of animals' experiences with wearables can be undertaken
to investigate species-specific discomfort and identify animal-centred requirements useful
to improve the 'animal-friendliness' of tags.