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One dreary November Monday as I was enjoying a morning cup of tea, my phone alerted me that my cat, Avalanche, was exercising less than usual. For the past six weeks, Avalanche has worn a sleek black-and-gold collar that tracks her every move—when and how often she sleeps, runs, walks, eats, drinks, and even grooms. This notification told me that her energy was lower than typical, so I should keep an eye on her food and water intake. As a veteran hypochondriac, I wondered for a second whether this might be the first sign of some horrible and serious condition. Then I opened the smart-collar app, where I found reassurance: My lazy seven-year-old tabby had exercised for just 45 seconds so far that morning, compared with one whole minute the day before.
These days, Americans treat our furry pals like members of the family, shelling out for premium food and expensive drugs to keep them healthier longer. There are pet treadmills and supplements and luxury spas. The U.S. pet market is poised to reach about $200 billion in sales by the end of the decade. At the same time, humans have become accustomed to a life that’s ever more quantified, with watches and phones that passively track heart rate and steps. Gadgets such as continuous glucose monitors are available to those who seek even more detail. Of course we’d enter the era of the quantified pet, tracking our four-legged companions’ diet, sleep, and exercise just as we do for ourselves.
The promise of this tech is a healthier pet. Animals can’t communicate in words when they’re feeling poorly, but data, the thinking goes, could reveal behavioral or medical issues early, and make them easier to treat. But a deluge of data can make real health concerns difficult to discern. It also totally stressed me out.
Most pet owners probably wonder what their animals get up to when the humans are away. Are they running around the house? Rummaging through the cupboard for Greenies? (Avalanche and her kid brother, Lewie, stole a bag of treats out of a basket while I was on vacation a few years ago.) Avalanche’s smart collar, called Catlog, gave me insight into some of her secret behaviors: She often has a drink and a snack after I’ve gone to bed, before settling in for the night herself. She frequently sleeps the entire time I am at the office.
Other information was less useful: Avalanche drinks water an average of four times a day, eats five or so times, exercises about two minutes, and spends about 30 minutes grooming, which the Catlog app informs me is somewhat low compared with similar cats. (My Apple Watch can’t even tell me how often I eat and groom.) Most of what she does, really, is sleep. (I could have told you that without a kitty Apple Watch.) And yet, most days since I downloaded the app, at least one notification has popped up flagging changes in Avalanche’s activity—eating more, exercising less, or just generally seeming less energetic—and I had no clue whether any of it was important. After a few weeks, I found myself inclined to ignore the notifications altogether.
My experience seems to be a common one. Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, a pet-tech expert at the University of Glasgow, told me she stopped checking data from her own dog’s tracking collar. “I just kept getting notifications of how much she had walked,” she said. “I found it quite hard to know what that information meant.” It’s a problem across the industry, David Roberts, who studies animal-computer interaction at North Carolina State University, told me. “None of these systems have yet cracked the code of how to take what they’re able to measure and derive the kinds of insights that owners want.”
The pet-wearables market is expected to about double by the end of the decade, and as it expands, it has the opportunity to offer some pet owners genuinely useful information. Jennifer Wiler, a nurse who lives in Brooklyn with seven cats, each of which wears a smart collar from a company called Moggie, told me she takes comfort in the app when she’s working long shifts. “It’s kind of just peace of mind to be able to check in, make sure they’re still, you know, getting playtime,” she said. Roberts studies how to use computers to train and evaluate dogs that are candidates to become service dogs; AI combined with sensors, for example, can look for signs of stress and other indicators. He told me the story of a colleague whose dog was a beta tester for one such wearable device. The technology had consistently predicted that her dog would be a good service dog, until one day it didn’t—it turned out the dog had a bad staph infection, which can become serious if left untreated.
Wearables could be especially helpful for cats, who are notoriously cryptic and tend to hide pain until a condition has significantly progressed. My first cat died mysteriously at age seven, her white-blood-cell count dangerously elevated, just two days after I noticed that she had become lethargic and was yowling in distress. Perhaps I could have gotten her better treatment if a wearable had alerted me sooner—and, crucially, if I had identified the warning signal among the endless noise of notifications.
A spokesperson for Rabo, the Japanese company that makes Catlog, wouldn’t share the criteria its AI uses to trigger alerts. “The alerts are designed to detect significant changes in your cat’s behavior or health data to help you take action when needed,” she said. The company also sells a litter-box mat that monitors weight and bathroom use. A product video assures users that it will prevent all these data from becoming overwhelming. But I got heaps of information from Catlog, and so far, none of it has helped me identify actual problems. When I took Avalanche in for her annual exam, I asked the vet about some of the things Catlog had flagged. According to the app, Avalanche ate and drank and ran around less than other cats, and I wondered if she was depressed or sick. My vet waved me off with a look that read somewhere between bemusement and Are you out of your mind?
The excessive notifications may have been a ploy for my engagement as much as they were attempts to alert me about my cat’s behavior. “I assume that these notifications are just ‘We want eyeballs on our app,’” Roberts told me. Research has shown that many pet wearables capture an alarming amount of data about people, not just their pets. One study found that some pet-tech apps captured data such as owners’ addresses and when they were home. Catlog’s privacy policy notes that it may track information about users’ online activity and share it with third parties. A company spokesperson told me that “the primary goal of collecting data from human users is to ensure that the app and devices provide maximum value to cat parents” and that the company’s privacy policy is “a broad statement designed to account for potential future uses,” which is not necessarily representative of information the app currently collects. Hirskyj-Douglas said that wearables companies could also share the information they collect with, say, pet insurers, just as some auto insurers track your driving habits and life insurers might track your health. (She also mentioned people have used trackers to spy on their dog sitters, and make sure they are actually walking the dog.) And Catlog is far from the only product competing for pet owners’ attention. Moggie offers an AI chatbot that impersonates users’ cats and answers health questions from their perspective. There are countless options for dogs.
Sometimes, when I’m at work, or on the subway, I absentmindedly open the Catlog app, to find, for example, that Avalanche recently ran for three seconds and then proceeded to take a 32-minute nap. It feels like the equivalent of texting my bestie or scrolling her Instagram feed, just because she’s on my mind. Spying on my cat has been fun, but not fun enough to justify the anxiety it induces. (My husband, who is not a hypochondriac, didn’t find the app all that stressful but didn’t find it useful either.) The day before I wrote this story, the collar’s battery died. I haven’t bothered to recharge it yet.
About the Author
Kristen V. Brown is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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