Transforming Pet Care with AI

Purina is a trusted pet care brand with 120 years of experience supporting pets and the people who care for them. Always striving to shape the future of pet care, Purina has a vision to share their deep expertise in pet health, behavior and nutrition directly with consumers to help give pets the best life possible. That vision and innovative spirit inspired Purina to build the Petivity Smart Litter Box Monitoring System to enable pet parents to better understand and care for their cats.

The Petivity connected system is powered by a physical device that sits under the litter box to track cats’ bathroom behavior. The collected data is sent to the cloud where AI algorithms, that are based on Purina’s industry-leading research, translate the data into actionable and personalized insights. Consumers can then view data and insights on the mobile app. 

Capgemini research shows that 88% of organizations will be offering intelligent services in the next five years but only 7% of them have scaled use cases for intelligent products and services. Petivity is Purina’s first connected offering. It represents a new way for the heritage CPG company to connect directly with their consumers by collecting unique data that powers personalized health insights and recommendations.

This work was delivered by teams from Synapse and Cambridge Consultants—organizations within the Capgemini Invent group that frog is also part of.

We were able to achieve this ambitious goal thanks to AI. We built AI models by capturing, tagging and leveraging over 300,000 litter box events and merging the algorithm classifications with Purina’s pet expertise. To be useful, the system needed to be able to reliably detect bathroom activity and track individual cats’ behavior over time.

Thanks to cats’ tendencies to stick to routines, we were able to design an AI system that could learn each cat’s unique behavior and report meaningful insights on an individual basis.

Through iteration and testing, we were able to refine the models to remove false positives, such as from cleaning the litter box, and remove false negatives by tweaking the thresholds.

AI trained on hundreds of thousands of litter box events, combined with Purina’s deep pet behavior and health expertise, enables Petivity to reliably provide personalized insights without resorting to privacy invasion or requiring changes to a cat’s normal litter box set up.

Throughout the development journey we considered how to make the system an enjoyable experience for both pets and the people who care for them.

Cats can be quite particular: they tend to stick to routines. Whereas other litter-based health products drastically change how a cat interacts with their litter box, risking rejection by the cat, The Petivity Smart Litter Box Monitor consists of a slim, smart platform that is placed below the existing litter box so as not to disturb a cat’s routine. Conveniently out of sight and out of mind for cat and pet parent alike.

Pet parents want reassurance that their cat is doing well and help understanding how best to care for their cat. We designed the digital interfaces to be easy to understand and give clear, early indication of any concerns. By studying pet parents' behavior in the app, we are able to constantly improve the experience and refine personas to best consider the user experience across the entire purchase, set up, use journey.

By learning from both cat and human users, we were able to identify and incorporate adjacent features, such as the poop-scoop scores. This gamifies litter box maintenance, resulting in cleaner litter boxes cats and humans love.