We here at Crunchwear love animals. There is nothing in life that isn’t made better by sharing it with a furry friend. This, quite obviously, also includes wearable technology. As such, we make it a point to cover interesting developments in the wild and wooly world of wearable pet tech. Some of it is quite useful, like collars that keep track of your pup at all times. However, some of it is also lands on the ‘ridiculous’ side of the spectrum. Today’s pooch post quite admittedly falls in line with the ridiculous. It just may be the laziest invention of all time.
Has your dog ever wanted to be walked but you just didn’t feel like it? Of course! Two scientists at Auburn University have developed some tech that make it so you can keep laying on your lazy butt eating potato chips and get your dog walked at the same time. How is that? You walk the pup virtually. It uses a wearable doggie suit that comes equipped with a microprocessor, wireless radio, and GPS receiver. The dog is trained to respond to commands that consist of a variety of vibrations and tones that come through the suit via your smartphone, tablet or other related device. It sounds highly implausible to these human ears, but researchers claim a 98% success rate when tried with actual dogs and their doggie ears.
Of course, this is just a working prototype model for now. It’s not like you can buy one of these suits at your local Petsmart and outfit your dog on the cheap. This kind of tech certainly needs to be developed more as certain questions need to be answered. What about noisy and highly trafficked environments etc. We’ll let you know about any interesting developments with this tech. In the meantime, you’ll just have to put those potato chips down and walk that mangy mutt yourself.
