Pintofeed, a new autonomous pet feeding system, currently available for pre-order at Indiegogo.com/pintofeed, will integrate the Electric Imp. Electric Imp’s hardware solution and cloud platform offer the on-board computing power, secure wireless connectivity and cloud computing services that Pintofeed was seeking in their quest to be the first truly intelligent feeding solution.
“The Imp provides all of the essential infrastructure off-the-shelf to allow us build a secure network of cloud connected Pintofeed appliances,” said Pintofeed Co-Founder and President Carlos Herrera. “This means that our patent pending algorithms and PetCloud™ services leverage the reliable communications provided by the Imp infrastructure, enabling owners and pet professionals to monitor, interact and care for their pets from remote locations via network connected devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops.”
More importantly, deciding to run our software on the Electric Imp has cut our development time by more than half.”
The pet industry has not seen a technological innovation for quite a while and traditional pet appliances provide no means of remotely monitoring or interacting with pets, remarked Herrera. As the pet industry catches up to the world of modern web-enabled appliances, there still remains a lack of a mechanism for intelligent pet appliances to communicate with the pet owners via social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and SMS. Together with Electric Imp, Pintofeed set out to provide a tech-savvy solution to enhance pet care with a device that is just as stylish as it is function and convenient.
According to Kevin Fox, Electric Imp co-founder, “The Pintofeed is exactly the kind of product that excites us. We created Electric Imp to make it simpler than ever before for people to set up and use their Internet connected devices, while also providing product developers with a powerful hardware and cloud platform that lets them focus on creating awesome devices and user experiences without having to worry about the heavy-lifting of making a scalable, reliable, secure service.
“As a cat owner and active Humane Society volunteer, I’ve personally been hoping for a product like the Pintofeed for a long time.”
The Pintofeed employs a number of sensors in order to help populate behavioral data such as how often the pet looks for food, how much water they drink, and more. The data is collected constantly and pushed back to the Pintofeed Pet Cloud™ servers for processing. Since artificial intelligence algorithms are notably computationally expensive, the Pintofeed servers gradually crunch the data and provide useful statistics over time that can be used to predict and adjust eating behaviors to enable the healthiest feeding regimen possible. The Pet Cloud™ fuses data that is input from numerous sources such as sensor data from your feeder, medical information provided by the pet owner as well as historical and technical information from professionals in the pet nutrition industry. Heuristic algorithms will compare the historical and live sensor data versus common behaviors and nutritional facts to refine the potential outcomes of the current behavior. For example, these types of heuristics can eventually help predict obesity, malnutrition or other weight related issues such as diabetes, that are common among household pets.
During its launch period, prices for Pintofeed will start at $99. When it hits stores next year, Pintofeed will retail for $149.
For more information on Pintofeed, visit www.indiegogo.com/pintofeed or www.pintofeed.com. For more on Electric Imp, visit www.electricimp.com.
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