idea → development → success (short claim)
Actijoy’s solution integrates hardware sensors with a mobile app that tracks dogs’ activity and health, and can help prevent serious issues. Dogs often have the same problems as their owners — a lack of physical activity can cause health problems, and monitoring their water and food intake is key to their wellbeing. With this in mind, Actijoy’s founders set out to build a device that could markedly improve the lives of humans’ best friends.
At first, our mission was to accelerate Actijoy’s development process, but that evolved into a deeper relationship in which we completely took over the app's development. Actijoy started mobile app development with our Martin Homolka as CTO, and, over the course of our relationship with Actijoy we went from being a supplier to being investors.
We first established supplier cooperation with Cookielab to accelerate development and strengthen our capabilities. With Martin Homolka as a co-founder of Actijoy, we had complete confidence in Cookielab. Moreover, their team met all of our engineering needs to develop the app. We gradually transitioned into an investor relationship during our cooperation, and successfully brought the app development to its final form. Their skills and professionalism were evident throughout the whole development process.
If you are looking for a smaller, tight-knit team of specialists that emphasizes a personal approach, development expertise, and professionalism, then Cookielab is the right choice for you.
COO & Co-Founder
The idea was to monitor a dog’s activity and nutritional intake via smart sensors on the dog’s collar and in their food and water bowls. We had to make sure the app could communicate properly with different sensors, process the data correctly, and then present the data in a user-friendly way. The most challenging aspect was synchronizing the communication between devices, servers and phones.
When developing the Actijoy mobile app, we leaned on our experience from other projects with IoT devices with an emphasis on Bluetooth connectivity. We were able to solve the “Android Bluetooth challenge” and secure functionality across all Android devices, including issuing updates to the app every time a new Android (and iOS, for that matter) version is released. The app is also able to run in the background, so users have the most recent data available immediately.
The most difficult part was gathering data from sensors. The Actijoy tracker uses a special 6-axis motion sensor, so to interpret the data from the sensor correctly, we cooperated with a data scientist who used machine learning techniques for training the system. In addition, thanks to our early entry into the project, we could influence the hardware and its firmware for future better use.
Monitoring the dog’s activity level
Monitoring the dog’s food and water intake
Data sync available anywhere 24/7 with food and water intake tracking
Healthbook
tracking of health records and sharing them with veterinarian
Barkfile
makes it easy to take great dog pictures
Push notifications and alerts
Actijoy plans to add new features to their sensors for even more comprehensive information about the dog’s wellbeing, including a sleep tracker and data on how fast dogs eat their food. We are thrilled to help as developers and be a part of the startup’s continued success as co-owners.
Actijoy’s solution integrates hardware sensors with a mobile app that tracks dogs’ activity and health, and can help prevent serious issues. Dogs often have the same problems as their owners — a lack of physical activity can cause health problems, and monitoring their water and food intake is key to their wellbeing. With this in mind, Actijoy’s founders set out to build a device that could markedly improve the lives of humans’ best friends.
At first, our mission was to accelerate Actijoy’s development process, but that evolved into a deeper relationship in which we completely took over the app's development. Actijoy started mobile app development with our Martin Homolka as CTO, and, over the course of our relationship with Actijoy we went from being a supplier to being investors.
“The Actijoy project combines multiple factors we like to work on here at Cookielab — it solves a meaningful problem and it is technically challenging. Having experience with IoT projects and mobile apps, we were happy to help not just as CTO and developers, but as investors as well.”
Co-Founder, Cookielab
First, we needed to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the app. Afterward, we created communication protocols and the mobile app’s architecture so the development team had everything required to plan and implement.
We also needed to find a solution for communication between mobile phones, sensors, and servers, and then had to solve the challenge of synchronization. The app has to work with multiple mobile devices connected to the same tracker and then be able to forward data to the server, which would trigger reload of the data on someone else’s phone.
It took a lot of experiments and iterations to find the optimal solution in terms of battery life (both on sensors and on phones), device memory, Bluetooth throughput, and synchronization speed. We created a testing framework for automated testing to be able to scale the functionality without being hampered by regression testing (bugs that would appear in the next implementation).
For phone-to-tracker communication, we wrote a custom library that ensured constant connection to the device in the background (even if the application was not open), data synchronization from the device, and mutual communication. This library automated all these tasks. The firmware update was solved by the Nordic Library.
We are ready to handle new challenges to ensure Actijoy’s growth and establishment in the market. From new features, to actualizations, to new IoT devices, our CTO and dev team remain at the disposal of the client and their noble goals.
