\n<\/p>\n
To cat owners, a litter box is a nuisance. But to scientists, it\u2019s a trove of information. A team of researchers at Nestl\u00e9 Purina PetCare decided to investigate litter boxes as records of behavior: the pre-squat scratch, the whirl, the precise geometry of the bury.<\/p>\n
The scientists built a painstaking dictionary of these gestures\u2014a full \u201cethogram,\u201d or catalog, of species-specific behaviors\u2014and then identified the distinct moves in feline bathroom habits: grooming, digging, sniffing litter. \u201cWe landed on 39 different behaviors that cats do in a litter box, with the understanding that depending on their satisfaction with the litter box, the environment and the dynamics around them, those behaviors will shift,\u201d says Ragen McGowan, director of digital and AI product development at Purina and one of the authors of a paper published recently in Applied Animal Behaviour Science on the development of Purina\u2019s AI-powered litter box monitor. \u201cWe realized this ethogram could be a window into their health.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cats commonly suffer from diabetes, obesity, kidney disease, hyperthyroidism, urinary tract infections and many more conditions. The researchers hoped to predict and stave off these ailments by training an artificial intelligence system on everything a cat can do in a litter box. They believed that AI could warn cat owners of feline health concerns long before the cats\u2014ever stoic and aloof\u2014showed signs.<\/p>\n
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But arriving at the 39 behavior types wasn\u2019t easy. The project began in 2018. The team gathered data from 191 cats\u2014140 at a company research center in Missouri and 51 in private homes. The researchers placed scales with a sensor at each corner that could detect tiny changes in weight and movement under litter boxes. They then made video recordings of every bathroom visit so that artificial intelligence could correlate the visual data with the weight and movements that the sensors recorded. But for the AI to do that, the scientists first had to generate the ethogram.<\/p>\n
Watching the videos, they labeled every nudge and movement, peering at ear angles, at the bunching or flaring of whiskers. If you\u2019ve ever watched a cat rotate exactly three and a half times before committing to a square inch of litter, you begin to understand the research process\u2014multiplied hundreds of thousands of times. \u201cWe took over 300,000 videos of cats eliminating in different scenarios\u2014single cat, multicat, all different types of litter boxes,\u201d McGowan says.<\/p>\n
The team then paired those video labels with the weight and movement data so that the AI could distinguish a quick tinkle from a philosophical contemplation. \u201cWe would work closely with our behaviorists to discuss what they\u2019re looking at in the videos, and then we had to develop mathematical equations,\u201d says Natalie Langenfeld-McCoy, manager of AI product development at Purina.<\/p>\n
The analysis of these recordings would become the foundation for Purina\u2019s Petivity Smart Litter Box Monitor, which, released in 2022, is already in more than 10,000 homes. The product is designed to alert pet owners when the measurements match the known patterns for certain cat ailments, and the team regularly updates the software to improve accuracy. The new paper documents the scientific steps behind its creation.<\/p>\n
The monitor slides beneath an existing litter box and can recognize each cat in the house, according to the study. \u201cNot only can we use their weight as a way to tell them apart but also their patterns in the litter box, the time of day they go and their normal habits to create what we call a \u2018paw print,\u2019 or signature, for that cat,\u201d McGowan says.<\/p>\n
The team intends for the tool to communicate problems cats are having or offer reassurance to owners when all is well. Feline kidney disease, for example, a progressive illness that often goes unnoticed in early stages, can be treated if caught early. \u201cBy the time most pet owners would notice a behavioral change, the loss of renal function will be over 80 percent, and there\u2019s no turning back,\u201d McGowan says. According to Purina\u2019s website, although \u201cinformation provided by Petivity Smart Litter Box Monitors is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease,\u201d the monitors can alert owners to \u201ckey changes that may indicate a health issue requiring a veterinary diagnosis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jessica Quimby, a small animal internal medicine specialist and professor at the Ohio State University, uses the Petivity monitor in her own research on feline kidney disease and recently published a paper showing clinically relevant results based on the monitor\u2019s measurements. (Quimby is a Nestl\u00e9 Purina PetCare advisory board member.) \u201cOne of the very first things you might see with the onset of disease, even before we know the cat has kidney disease, is that they\u2019re losing weight and urinating more,\u201d Quimby says. \u201cWe can see those trends appearing on the Petivity data.\u201d Cats, she explains, are good at hiding health problems from their caregivers.<\/p>\n
The smart litter box does, however, have its limitations. \u201cIf are close in weight and they have a similar pattern of elimination, that\u2019s a struggle for the system,\u201d says Langenfeld-McCoy. She recommends that five or fewer cats use one system. But improvements in AI capabilities should help distinguish between similar cats soon. \u201cThe deep-learning models can pick out subtle differences in behavior that maybe we don\u2019t even know exist, so we\u2019re moving towards that for those cats that are close in weight,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Household antagonists\u2014nudgy robot vacuums, percussive washing machines\u2014can also cause confusion, so the team coached cat owners on placement during its research. But often when problems arise, the fix is less engineering than sociology. Langenfeld-McCoy recalls a home in which the AI indicated the cat had done its usual behavior but left nothing behind. \u201cThe family dog would come after the cat and have a snack, which was confusing the AI,\u201d she says. With a baby gate installed, the AI recovered its composure. Sometimes the outlier in the data is a Labrador.<\/p>\n
Although the Petivity Smart Litter Box Monitor has been on the market for three years, the team waited until it had ample data to publish its scientific findings. \u201cSmart\u201d is one of those labels that arouses suspicion\u2014smart toasters send overanxious notifications; smart fridges upsell milk. So when we hear \u201csmart litter box,\u201d we picture an appliance with delusions of grandeur. The new study is a way for the team at Purina to pull back the curtain for users and skeptics alike and let cat owners determine whether \u201csmart\u201d gets to take off its quotation marks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To cat owners, a litter box is a nuisance. But to scientists, it\u2019s a trove of information. A team of researchers at Nestl\u00e9 Purina PetCare decided to investigate litter boxes as records of behavior: the pre-squat scratch, the whirl, the precise geometry of the bury. The scientists built a painstaking dictionary of these gestures\u2014a full<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27027,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[1922,5011,37,16179,8794,6441],"class_list":{"0":"post-27026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-box","9":"tag-cat","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-litter","12":"tag-predict","13":"tag-visits"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27026\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}