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SNIF Labs Inc. has had a string of private investments over the past two years, but the company is only betting some of the money on the dogs. Its product, called a SNIF tag, is made to track dogs’ social and physical activity. But the company is now trying it out on a different animal — doctors.
About the size of a Tic Tac box, the SNIF tag contains an accelerometer and an RFID chip, and is designed to mount on a dog collar. The accelerometer logs each minute the dog spends running, sitting or sleeping. All data goes up to a Facebook-style web page that represents your dog’s social life and its activity.
The product is available online for about $150. But, consumer spending being what it is, the company has deployed a second business model. Arizona State University researchers are using SNIF tags to track staff interactions at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, and determine their effect on outcomes in the 650-bed hospital’s emergency room and intensive care unit — part of a five-year study of medical areas.
“We’re actually making more money in health care than we are in the consumer market,” said CTO Jonathan Gips, who co-founded the company in 2005 with fellow MIT Media Lab graduates Noah Paessel and Philip Liang.
Since shipping its product in November, the company has reduced its size by half, laying off six employees at its downtown Boston headquarters, Gips said. SNIF Labs (the SNIF stands for Social Networking In Fur) is in the process of retooling for a push in the health care and logistics businesses. Gips declined to disclose the amount of SNIF Labs’ funding, or name investors.
Kanav Kahol, a researcher on the Banner Medical Center study, learned about SNIF tags in a January 2008 story on the website IEEE Spectrum online, which identified the pet-tracking technology as one of the year’s “losers” in the social media space. He said he recognized SNIF tags’ potential right away.
The tags, worn by hospital staff in conjunction with portable voice recorders, create a black-box record of how staff interact during the course of every patient’s care, Kahol said. “If a patient arrives to an ER, all the people with the tags gather around a particular bay station. That’s something you can recognize … If the nurse is talking to the resident, you know there’s some sort of education that’s going on.”
ASU’s biomedical informatics department vice-chair Vimla Patel, who is directing the study, said other possible study subjects include aircraft maintenance crews, firefighters or any complex situation where outcomes are critical, Patel said.
However, SNIF Labs isn’t giving up on the consumer potential with pet owners. The product also has potential benefits for pets, said Brian Adams, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “What it’s making the owner do is focus on the animal and say, ‘I want to know more about my animal’s exercise regimen, is it receiving enough exercise, and does it need more. I’m going to ask my vet about this,’” Adams said.
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