Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to refine diagnoses or identify diseases. In Japan, it is also used for pet care.
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A brand new app called CatsMe has been downloaded tens of thousands of times across the country. It allows cat owners to detect signs of pain in their favorite animals in seconds. Launched just a few months ago by the startup Carelogy, which works with researchers from Nihon University, this application is already a huge success and claims more than 230,000 users.
The principle is quite simple. The application automatically identifies signs of pain, even slight ones, in cats. It is a kind of check-up at home to find out if the animal has a hidden problem and if it needs to go to the vet or not.
Simply take a photo of the cat’s head and upload it to the CatsMe app. There, the platform will compare the image with more than 6,000 cat images. Healthy cats but also thousands of cats, of all breeds, who suffer from a chronic illness or who have recently had a single problem or a minor accident. The software will analyze the cat’s grimace, compare it to the cat’s in the database and automatically calculate its degree of pain on a scale developed by researchers.
The software basically looks at five things in your cat’s facial expressions. The location of his ears. The more the cat suffers, the more its ears flatten and turn outwards. Then the degree to which his eyes are closed, his head position, the tension of his muzzle and finally the position of his whiskers. If these face forward or if they are too straight, this is not a good sign. After analyzing the cat’s portrait in a few seconds, the application will determine its level of suffering and say if there is a problem or not.
This analysis of “grimaces” currently only works with cats. The developers say they focused on these animals because they tend to hide their pain much more than dogs, which are more readable by their owners. But researchers are thinking of an application for dogs, for hamsters and why not a service for domestic animals, such as cows or sheep. They explain that the potential to analyze these facial grimaces ultimately exists in humans, especially in those who cannot explain their pain, for example babies or people suffering from severe cognitive illnesses.
