Feline accessories specialist Rabo of Japan has updated its monitoring app with AI smarts. According to a news release (machine translation) from the company earlier this week (h/t The Register), the Catalog cat collar and app can now alert pet owners’ about their animal’s ‘Stress Score.’ We thought a large attraction of cats was for relieving their owners’ stress... On the topic of new features, there’s also a beta test feature in the app that can alert you if your cat vomits.
Before the above updates, the information passed to pet owners from the Catlog cat collar and app were already quite extensive. According to our machine translations of the app’s UI, the app monitors and can report back when your cat is doing the following:
- Eating
- Drinking water
- Sleeping
- Running
- Walking
- Resting
- Grooming
- Vomiting (beta)
In addition, the Catalog app appears to monitor and chart your feline’s breathing and body temperature.
Last but not least, when highlighting the current abilities of the Catalog system, the app can also be usful if your moggy disappears. Cats can be quite adventurous, and go missing from time to time. Rabo's app can help give reassurance regarding the location of your animal, its health, mood, and so on.
Now with added stress – thanks AI
Now, Rabo has turned up the feature count and potential usefulness of the Catalog system by adding some Artificial Intelligence smarts. Specifically, the company has used machine learning to process 10 billion data points gathered from 46,000 cats.
Reading the PR blurb, we understand that the new Stress alert function takes into account a mix of sensors and your animal’s behavioral log. Important factors in determining stress levels include temperature and breathing readings, plus any other notable deviations from your cat’s normal state.
The new cat stress level icon is a cat head silhouette with a lightning bolt superimposed, which seems logical. We think the ‘Grooming’ icon has missed the most obvious feline silhouette for that activity, though. Cats I’ve owned spend most of their ‘grooming time’ with one leg in the air.
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