Japanese Researchers Developed An App To Detect Cat Pain
Cats are considered lucky in Japan, and those who own these beloved pets are known to spend a fortune on their maintenance. However, cats are hard to decipher. Their mood constantly changes, and you can’t tell what devious plan they’re coming up with or they’re in pain.
A technology company and a university in Tokyo collaborated to create an application based on thousands of cat pictures which they claim can inform you that your cat is upset.
Since its launch in October, “Cat Pain Detector” has attracted 43,000 users, most located in Japan but also across Europe and South America, said Go Sakioka, the head of development at Carelogy.
It’s part of an increasing array of technology that pet owners are concerned about their pets’ health, including similar tracking devices for mood and pain in Canada and Israel.
Carelogy joined forces in partnership with Nihon’s College of Bioresource Sciences to collect 6,000 photos of cats, and they studied with care how the animals’ ears, noses, whiskers, and eyelids.
The researchers then employed a scoring system created in collaboration with researchers at the University of Montreal to measure the tiniest distinctions between healthy cats and cats suffering from pain because of difficult-to-identify illnesses.
After that, app creators fed the data into an AI detector, which is further enhancing its capabilities by analyzing around 600,000 pictures submitted by users, Sakioka explained.
According to the app’s developer, the app can now detect a cat’s painful expression with an accuracy of up to 90%. According to Japan Pet Food Association, 60 percent of owners bring their pet to the vet annually at the most.
“We want to help cat owners judge more easily at home whether to see a vet or not,” Sakioka stated.
“Cat Pain Detector” is currently being utilized by a few vets for testing purposes within Japan, where cat culture is quite famous with various spiritual significance and idol Hello City and also with a good business in cat cafes.
They still think the learning phase isn’t over, though. The AI needs to be trained much more before becoming a standard.
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