Cat owners who love to take pictures of their furry friends now have a new excuse to pull out their smartphones and take a snapshot: it may actually help their pet.
Sylvester.ai, a Canadian animal health technology company, 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.
A 2019 study published in peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports found the so-called “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,” says Sylvester.ai's Miche Priest. “We were able to train a machine using machine learning and a series of images.”
The app could also help young veterinarians, says Dr Liz Ruelle of the Wild Rose Cat Clinic in Calgary, where developers trained the algorithm.
“I love working with cats, have grown up with cats,” she says. “For colleagues who maybe have not had quite so much experience, it can be very daunting to know — is your patient in pain?”
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 wellbeing, says Alice Potter from Britain's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
“Cats that are worried or scared will hold that tail really tight and tense to them,” she says. “Aside from that, there's also just thinking about their behaviour in terms of are they eating, drinking, toileting, sleeping, like they usually do?”
