Tag Your Wag: Maricopa County Animal Care and Control
To give man’s best friend a helping hand (or paw), the ASU Cloud Innovation Center (ASU CIC) is partnering with Maricopa County Animal Care and Control (ACC). The ASU CIC is creating a prototype of a dog registry and informational website in order to facilitate the process of registering dogs, which makes it much likelier for them to be returned to their owners in the event that they are lost.
Problem
Maricopa County is home to over 900,000 dogs, but only 35% of them formally register with the County. Licensing fees fund approximately 25% of Animal Care and Control efforts, including shelter costs. The low registration rate limits the services the County can provide and the number of animals we can serve. The dog licensing process required owners to have their rabies certification and a credit card for payment, which prevented some users from completing the process. In addition, there can be financial consequences for owners if they do not register their dogs, as fines can be imposed when unregistered dogs are found and/or have bitten someone.
Approach
To make it easier for owners to register their dogs, the ASU CIC is creating a prototype of the Tag Your Wag app. This app will be a simple way to upload rabies vaccination records and other vital information, as well as pay the fees quickly and easily with more payment options. The app will also be available to veterinarians, who can upload vaccination records on behalf of their clients. This will increase the number of registered dogs in Maricopa County, enabling the County to help more dogs and support their owners.
Supporting Artifacts
The Amazon Working Backwards process produces three artifacts - a Press Release, a list of Frequently Asked Questions, and a Visual depiction of the user experience.You can find the Dog Licensing artifacts here:
Next Steps
The ASU CIC is currently developing the Dog Licensing solution.
About the ASU CIC
The ASU Smart Cities Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is supported by AWS on ASU’s Innovation campus - SkySong. The mission of the CIC is to drive Innovation Challenges that materially benefit the greater Phoenix metro area and beyond. The CIC will do this by solving pressing community and regional challenges, using shareable and repeatable technology solutions from ideation through prototype, as a service for the greater human good.
The CIC also provides real-world problem-solving experiences to students by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector.
The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, water conservation, vandalism, pedestrian safety, digital service delivery and many others. The CIC leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develops solutions that meet the customer needs.
For more information on the ASU CIC, to read about projects or to submit a challenge, please visit https://smartchallenges.asu.edu.