Pawster Care: An Android-based Pet Cruelty Reporting and Adoption Application with Recommender System

This paper describes the development of Pawster Care mobile application. This app allows Davao City Veterinary Office, private organizations, and private owners in searching for their pets a potential adopter and finding a new home. Moreover, this study aimed to help implement Republic Act No. 8485, Section 6, that forbids any person to commit pet cruelty acts, by providing pet cruelty reporting module. The app has been developed for the Android platform. The researchers performed agile scrum throughout the management and development of the software. Also, the researchers utilized Item-based Collaborative Filtering implementing Pearson correlation and k-nearest neighbor algorithm to produce a list of recommended pets for adoption for each user. The app described in this work was tested by a representative from the Davao City Veterinary Office, pet owners, and potential pet adopters. Results from this study show that the app can help the agency or private individuals find for their pet a potential adopter. Moreover, app user can easily report pet cruelty. The app can be further improved by adding the following features: real-time chat, location auto-complete when submitting a report, and improve the prediction accuracy of recommender systems using other data mining techniques.