Petbe

Abstract

The demand for pet monitoring devices is growing due to the increasing number of one-person households raising pets. However, current monitoring methods using video camera entail various problems, which may lead to discontinued usage. To overcome this problem, we propose Petbe, a social robot that projects your own pet using a context-aware approach based on BLE beacons and Raspberry Pis. The corresponding smartphone application provides various robot status updates (robot head) and movements (robot body). With the development of Petbe, we conducted an exploratory study to verify the advancement of the above issues on monitoring user's own pets with the following factors: privacy concern, companionship, awareness, connectivity, and satisfaction. The outcomes indicate that Petbe helps to reduce privacy concerns and build companionship through empathetic interaction.