Sarama AI approached us with a clear but deeply nuanced challenge: to design a dog-tracking system that goes beyond monitoring activity and instead helps owners truly understand their dog’s needs. The aim was not to create another dashboard of metrics, but to build a tool that interprets behavior, emotion, and wellbeing in ways that meaningfully improve the human–dog relationship.

Dogs communicate continuously through vocal cues, movement patterns, and physiological changes, yet much of this language remains opaque to owners until discomfort or illness becomes visible. Sarama’s vision was to use AI to interpret these signals early, surfacing emotional and health insights before they escalate into symptoms. The tracker needed to work quietly in the background, learning over time and across contexts, while empowering owners to respond with greater empathy and confidence.

Our design response centered on translation rather than surveillance. The smart collar was conceived as a passive observer, collecting data without disrupting the dog’s natural behavior. Paired with a free mobile app, these inputs are contextualized into clear, actionable insights—framed not as alerts, but as patterns, tendencies, and shifts in state. The goal was to help owners build intuition, not replace it.