Scientists Turned 300,000 Litter Box Visits into an AI-Powered Cat Health Monitor
Cat bathroom data from an AI-powered litter box could offer useful pet health insights
To cat owners, a litter box is a nuisance. But to scientists, it’s a trove of information. A team of researchers at Nestlé Purina PetCare decided to investigate litter boxes as records of behavior: the pre-squat scratch, the whirl, the precise geometry of the bury.
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—ever stoic and aloof—showed signs.
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
But arriving at the 39 behavior types wasn’t easy. The project began in 2018. The team gathered data from 191 cats—140 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.
Watching the videos, they labeled every nudge and movement, peering at ear angles, at the bunching or flaring of whiskers. If you’ve 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—multiplied hundreds of thousands of times. “We took over 300,000 videos of cats eliminating in different scenarios—single cat, multicat, all different types of litter boxes,” McGowan says.
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. “We would work closely with our behaviorists to discuss what they’re looking at in the videos, and then we had to develop mathematical equations,” says Natalie Langenfeld-McCoy, manager of AI product development at Purina.
The analysis of these recordings would become the foundation for Purina’s 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.
The monitor slides beneath an existing litter box and can recognize each cat in the house, according to the study. “Not 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 ‘paw print,’ or signature, for that cat,” McGowan says.
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. “By the time most pet owners would notice a behavioral change, the loss of renal function will be over 80 percent, and there’s no turning back,” McGowan says. According to Purina’s website, although “information provided by Petivity Smart Litter Box Monitors is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease,” the monitors can alert owners to “key changes that may indicate a health issue requiring a veterinary diagnosis.”
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’s measurements. (Quimby is a Nestlé Purina PetCare advisory board member.) “One 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’re losing weight and urinating more,” Quimby says. “We can see those trends appearing on the Petivity data.” Cats, she explains, are good at hiding health problems from their caregivers.
The smart litter box does, however, have its limitations. “If [cats] are close in weight and they have a similar pattern of elimination, that’s a struggle for the system,” 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. “The deep-learning models can pick out subtle differences in behavior that maybe we don’t even know exist, so we’re moving towards that for those cats that are close in weight,” she says.
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. “Smart” is one of those labels that arouses suspicion—smart toasters send overanxious notifications; smart fridges upsell milk. So when we hear “smart litter box,” 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 “smart” gets to take off its quotation marks.
Deni Ellis Béchard is Scientific American’s senior tech reporter. He is author of 10 books and has received a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, a Midwest Book Award and a Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism. He holds two master’s degrees in literature, as well as a master’s degree in biology from Harvard University. His most recent novel, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine, explores the ways that artificial intelligence could transform humanity. You can follow him on X, Instagram and Bluesky @denibechard.
If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.
I’ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.
If you , you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.
In return, you get essential news, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, , must-watch videos, challenging games, and the science world’s best writing and reporting. You can even gift someone a subscription.
There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you’ll support us in that mission.
Thank you,
David M. Ewalt, Editor in Chief, Scientific American
Source: www.scientificamerican.com