New App Uses AI To Track Your Cat's Health And Mood Using Facial Recognition Technology

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) - Want to know how your cat is feeling? There's now an app for that.

As a general rule, cats are notorious for masking their pain. Prior to becoming domesticated, they adapted a deep natural instinct to disguise discomfort so they wouldn't become an easy target for predators in the wild.

But experts say cats do communicate a lot of information -- it's just subtle.

That's where Tably comes in. It's a new app developed by Sylvester.ai, a Canadian animal health technology company based in Calgary, Alberta. Developers say it uses artificial intelligence to decode your cat's subtle facial cues to deliver a speedy assessment of their well being.

"What it does is it helps human cat owners know if their cat is in pain or not," says Miche Priest, Sylvester.ai's venture lead. "So it uses facial recognition technology. All you need to do is take a picture with your camera and then it can give you a result."

Priest says Tably uses the "feline grimace scale" (FGS), which looks at ear and head position, eye-narrowing, muzzle tension and how whiskers change to detect distress.

"The feline grimace scale is validated, there are papers that have been published on it," she tells Reuters. "It's a way for animal practitioners to be able to determine the level of pain that a cat is in based on those facial characteristics."

Experts say while the app could become an important tool to help cat owners keep track of their pet's overall health, cat owners should also look at their pet's whole body, including the tail, for clues about their well-being.

"Cats that are worried or scared will hold that tail really tight and tense to them," says Alice Potter from British animal charity the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

"And then aside from that, there's also just thinking about their behavior in terms of are they eating, drinking, toileting, sleeping like they usually do? Have they started showing more aggressive behavior? Have they started hiding more? All of these things help to build the context, which is really important," she adds.