Skip to main content

Tailio turns your cat’s litter box into a health monitor, sees if cats can predict earthquakes

Tailio turns your cat's litter box into a smart health monitor

Cat lovers: Your kitty’s litter box doesn’t have to be just a dumb sandbox of unpleasant treasures. Thanks to the Tailio, litter boxes can now be turned into smart monitors that tell cat owners about the health of their feline friends.

The Tailio isn’t going to impress anyone with its appearance, since it basically looks like a plain white scale. But place a litter box atop the device and sync it with the Tailio mobile app and cat owners can keep up-to-date on their pet’s weight, waste production, and frequency of visits and behavior in the litter box.

Recommended Videos

The app tracks trends and alerts a cat’s owner if there’s any indication of health concerns that require attention or if the litter box simply needs cleaning. Information from the Tailio app can be shared with veterinarians to help diagnose any issues.

Cat owners can also use the app to get reminders to give their pets medicines and supplements, if applicable. They can also check symptoms and other resources within the app. There are social features in the app, which enable users to share photos, post status updates and connect with other Tailio users.

The Tailio is also able to distinguish between multiple cats based on their behavior and physical attributes.

Users can download the mobile app for their Android or iOS smartphone and link to the Tailio via Wi-Fi. The Tailio’s battery lasts about 2-4 weeks, depending on how many cats use the litter box atop the device and how often the litter box is used.

The team behind the Tailio also plans to partner with the National Science Foundation to study Tailio-using cats along fault lines in Southern California to see if cats can actually detect earthquakes.

The Tailio’s Kickstarter campaign has raised nearly $60,000, double the $30,000 goal. The project closes on Dec. 12, with initial shipments and the app release slated to take place in April 2015. “Early bird” backers who want to receive the device in April can get the Tailio for $99. The device is also available for $149 via Kickstarter for cat owners who are fine with a May delivery.

Jason Hahn
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jason Hahn is a part-time freelance writer based in New Jersey. He earned his master's degree in journalism at Northwestern…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more