Feline okay? The app that tells you if your cat's happy
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Dr Liz Ruelle using a new app called Tably that reads a cat's face and helps her monitor its health at the Wild Rose Cat clinic in Calgary, Canada's Alberta province.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Follow topic:
CALGARY • Cat owners who love to take pictures of their furry friends now have a new excuse to do so: it may actually help the cat.
A Calgary, Alberta, animal health technology company, Sylvester.ai, has developed an app called Tably that uses the phone's camera to tell whether a feline is feeling pain.
The app looks at ear and head position, eye-narrowing, muzzle tension, and how whiskers change, to detect distress in a cat.
A 2019 study published in the journal Scientific Reports found that the "feline grimace scale" or FGS is a valid and reliable tool for acute pain assessment in cats.
"It helps human cat owners know if their cat is in pain or not," said Mr Miche Priest, Sylvester.ai's venture lead. "We were able to train a machine using machine learning and a series of images."
The app could help young veterinarians, said Dr Liz Ruelle of the Wild Rose Cat Clinic in Calgary, where developers trained the algorithm. "I love working with cats, have always grown up with cats," she said. "For other colleagues, new grads, who may not have had quite so much experience, it can be very daunting to know - is your patient painful?"
An app that learns patterns from images of cat faces can be helpful but cat owners should also look at their pet's whole body, including the tail, for clues about their well-being, said Ms Alice Potter from British animal charity the RSPCA.
"Cats that are worried or scared will hold that tail really tight and tense. There's also just thinking about their behaviour in terms of are they eating, drinking... sleeping like they usually do?"
REUTERS
