Be My Home in Smart Cities: A Mobile Application for Stray Animal Tracking, Adoption and Shelter Management

Özet

The management, monitoring, and welfare of stray animals in Turkey has become more challenging due to the increasing population, rapid urbanization, and uncontrolled breeding. The increase in the number of stray animals leads to numerous problems such as traffic accidents, diseases, animal attacks, and environmental pollution, while the current shelter capacity remains insufficient. In this study, within the context of the smart city concept, the Be My Home mobile application has been developed for the management, tracking, and adoption of stray animals in smart cities. The Be My Home mobile application was developed in Java using Android Studio, while Firebase infrastructure was employed for data management. The system offers various features such as animal profiles, health and vaccination tracking, adoption, announcements and lost/found notifications, shelter reviews, shelter statistics, real-time data synchronization, location-based announcement filtering, and shelter management. Tests show that the application can be used effectively by both individual users and shelter officials. As a result, the developed mobile application has the potential to contribute to the smart city vision by enhancing stray animal welfare, enabling sustainable population management, modernizing shelters, and fostering responsible citizen participation.