Reuters.- Cat owners who love taking photos of their furry friends now have a new excuse to pull out their smartphones and snap a snapshot – you can help the cat.
Sylvester.ai, a Calgary, Alberta animal health technology company, has developed an app called Tably who uses the phone’s camera to tell if a feline is in pain.
The application analyzes the position of the ears and the head, the narrowing of the eyes, the tension of the muzzle and how the whiskers change to detect distress.
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A 2019 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports found the so-called “feline gesture scale,” or FGS, to be a valid and reliable tool for the assessment of acute pain in cats.
“It helps human cat owners to know if their cat is in pain or not ”, said Miche Priest, company leader from Sylvester.ai. “We were able to train a machine using machine learning and a series of images.”
The app could help young vets, said Dr. Liz Ruelle of the Wild Rose Cat Clinic in Calgary, where developers trained the algorithm.
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“I love working with cats, I have always grown up with them,” he said. “For other colleagues, recent graduates, who may not have had as much experience, it can be very overwhelming to know: is your patient in pain?”
An application that learns patterns from images of cat faces can be useful, But cat owners should also look at their pet’s entire body, including the tail, for clues to its well-being, said Alice Potter of the British animal charity RSPCA.
“Cats that are worried or scared will keep that tail very tight and taut. And besides that, you also have to think about their behavior in terms of whether they are eating, drinking, going to the bathroom, sleeping as they usually do ”.
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