KitBit: An Instrumented Collar for Indoor Pets

This paper presents KitBit, a wearable activity tracker for cats, aiming to improve communication between domestic cats and their owners by monitoring feline behavior. We present a compact, lightweight, collar-mounted device with an onboard IMU (accelerometer/gyroscope) and wireless data transmission capabilities. This device was evaluated in a set of hour-long play sessions in the homes of 11 different domestic cats, where it showed good catergonomics and a high degree of reliability while collecting IMU data. An LSTM model trained on the data achieved an overall accuracy of 80.13% in determining the cats' level of activity compared to a manually-labeled ground-truth dataset. This result shows the feasibility of tracking domestic cats' activities, and the potential for future developments in feline wearable technology.