BTYSE: Darragh’s app a Godsend for dogowners

As a first year last year, Darragh Filtness debuted in the Young Scientist competition with a pet care app. This year he won through the preliminary selection stage again with a new app – Nutri-Mates – which helps assess nutrition needs in both pets and humans.

Darragh’s view is that pets – like their owners – deserve and benefit from a diverse and balanced diet, tailored to their needs, and his app aims at simplifying what he describes as "the complex world of pet food". He was amazed to discover, through a survey he conducted, that nearly 90 per cent of pet owners were unsure about how often they should feed their pets – and admits that one of the things he learned was that the two dogs in his family need different quantities of food.

Darragh explains that the section of the app that deals with human nutrition was in ways more straightforward to create as humans are just human, while with dogs, the calculations have to take account of their breed – and there are a lot of breeds.