Pharmacy Daily | Dispensary Corner 05 Jul 23

CATS are considered lucky in Japan, and owners of the popular pets spend big on their care, reported Yahoo! News.

But how do you know when they are 'feline' down?

A tech firm and university in Tokyo have teamed up to produce an app trained on thousands of cat photos that they say can tell you when the puss is in pain.

Since its release last month, 'Cat Pain Detector' has racked up 43,000 users, mostly in Japan but also in Europe and South America, said Go Sakioka, head of the developer, Carelogy.

The app is part of a growing array of tech for pet owners concerned for their furry friends' wellbeing, including similar mood and pain trackers made in Canada and Israel.

Carelogy teamed up with Nihon University's College of Bioresource Sciences to gather 6,000 cat photos, in which they carefully studied the positions of the animals' ears, noses, whiskers and eyelids.

They then used a scoring system designed by the University of Montreal to measure minute differences between healthy cats and those suffering pain due to hard-to-spot illnesses.

Next, the app developers fed the information into an AI detection system, which has further refined its skills thanks to around 600,000 photos uploaded by users, Sakioka said.

Now the app "has an accuracy level of more than 90%," he explained.