Tablets for tabbies: A look at technology, animal welfare, and interaction in cat cafes

For animal lovers, visiting a well-run cat cafe can be a dream—but rapid growth of these businesses, along with concerns about the welfare of cats in these types of environments, has led the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and Cats Protection (the UK’s largest cat welfare charity) to call for a phasing out of these establishments.

Improving human-animal interactions across various spaces, from zoos to commercial settings (like cat cafes) has been a main focus for Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Ph.D., director of the Animal-Computer Interaction Lab and lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and her group for some time. (In fact, you might recall a previous Trends article about parrots using technology to socialize remotely).

And so, when Florence P.E. Payne, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Glasgow, expressed interest in exploring how cats interact with technology in cafe environments for her master’s research project, Hirskyj-Douglas needed no convincing.

“I saw an opportunity to investigate whether technology-mediated interactions could address these welfare concerns while maintaining or enhancing visitor experience,” she said. “Essentially, we’re exploring whether indirect interaction through a technological interface can reduce animal stress without diminishing human satisfaction.”

That’s when Look What the Cat Tapped In: Exploring Digital Interactive Systems Designed for the Cat Cafe Experience began.

Payne was drawn to the topic because it was relatively unexplored—which presented some challenges when it came to determining exactly how to go about the research. “At the start, we weren’t really sure what the application we would ultimately develop would look like, as we couldn’t find information about how cats in public spaces physically engage with interactive systems,” she said. But they knew they wanted to use a portable screen interface, which would be familiar to the average cat cafe visitor.

The birth of MewTube

“So, our first step in developing the system was running experiments with the cats in a local cat cafe, observing how they engaged with a range of content on a tablet and a laptop,” she said. The cats spent much of the time passively watching videos; they were less drawn to physically touching the screen or interacting with the content on the screen directly.

That led the team to consider how the app, named MewTube, could create an interactive experience, giving the human users a way to control the content shown to provide them a better sense of inclusion in the encounter (while allowing the cats to respond in a way that felt natural).

Hirskyj-Douglas noted that technology-mediated interactions with other species in zoos, such as red-ruffed lemurs, have enhanced people’s education, experience, and empathy with animals, “but this is when people cannot physically touch the animal.” The team hypothesized that tablet-based interactions in cat cafes might work similarly, “as this could potentially elicit more positive behavioral responses from the cats themselves, having greater agency in the interaction without the stress of being handled or petted by unfamiliar individuals.”

They loaded a library of 12 videos onto the tablets. “We looked for a range of different types of videos from various animals, different motion patterns, different colors, and different paces,” Payne said. “Most importantly, we made sure that there were no unsettling loud noises to not disturb the cats or guests.”

Human users had the ability to adjust playback speed using a slider-based control bar, making it simple for them to change the speed based on the cat’s response.

Surprising findings

The initial hypothesis did not prove true.

“The findings, which revealed the opposite to be the fact, were very interesting,” said Payne. She began the study thinking of how watching animal videos with her own cat was a bonding experience. “ I have since realized that this is likely because we already have an existing relationship. I understand my cat’s specific mannerisms and can quite easily spot when he’s having a positive versus negative reaction to something,” she said. “For guests in a cat cafe, this level of understanding doesn’t exist, and as such, it’s much harder for individuals to interpret the behavior of cats they are meeting for the first time.”

Because of this, many human participants expressed uncertainty regarding how the cats felt about their interaction. “I don’t feel as though this is a negative or disappointing outcome; however, it just highlights the nuances of developing technologies for animals, such as MewTube, and how we must consider context and relationships when designing for and with animals,” Payne said.

Rébecca Kleinberger, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, was the coauthor of the study. “Although I mainly help support the project remotely from an external point of view, this is one of the parts that felt most meaningful and thoughtful from the approach,” she added, “reinforcing how preexisting relationships between humans and animals, and the time we invest individually with each animal, are crucial in shaping our experience of togetherness.”

Ethical considerations

“It was incredibly important to all of us that the ethical treatment of our feline participants remained at the forefront of our research,” said Payne. And that effort was backed up with study approval from the University of Glasgow Ethics Committee.

But what does an ethical approach to commercial interaction with cats entail?

“In a practical sense, we ensured that the cats were able to withdraw themselves at any point in our testing,” explained Payne. That meant that if a cat began to walk away while anyone was showing them something on the tablet, they were allowed to leave and weren’t followed. Payne also noted that, if a human participant was trying to interact with a cat who wasn’t responding positively, they’d step in and stop them, sometimes encouraging them to try with a different cat.

“The less tangible way we’ve considered matters of ethics is in the way we have written our paper and thought about the research in general,” Payne continued. “When writing about research performed with humans (who can talk) and animals (who cannot talk) it is very easy to unconsciously shift the focus onto the humans’ experiences and overlook the perspectives of the animals.

“While we have only been able to evaluate human feedback on the unfolding of the experiments, we framed research questions in a way which asked them to reflect upon the cats’ experiences (for example, ‘To what extent did you feel that the cats enjoyed your interaction?’),” Payne said. “This has helped us to reduce anthropocentric bias, as participants reflected on the experience for both themselves and the cats, rather than just their own entertainment.”

Kleinberger noted that this echoed a recently published collaboration between her lab and Hirskyj-Douglas’s, which showed that many animal technology research projects view animals as subjects, not users.

Payne realizes this doesn’t remove the bias entirely, but being transparent about its existence—and considering ways to address it in future research by monitoring feline biomarkers—is a step in the right direction. “Additionally, during the process of designing the MewTube application, we gathered design insights directly from interactions with cats to produce a system which treats them as equal stakeholders/end-users,” she explained.

Top takeaways

The biggest takeaway, according to Payne, is that “applications such as MewTube should support interactions in a cat cafe, not replace existing interactions.”

Apps like this may help first-time visitors (especially those unfamiliar with feline body language) feel more comfortable interacting with the cats, while more experienced guests may still prefer traditional interactions. “For many people, petting the cats and playing with them is a very comforting experience, which can also be beneficial for the cats,” Payne said. “We shouldn’t be aiming to take that away, but instead we should be looking to provide alternatives, to allow people to interact in a way which is more comfortable for them and also the cats.”

Hinksy-Douglas believes the study speaks to broader challenges in developing technology for animals that reside in environments where they have contact with humans.

“Throughout this project, we’ve grappled with how to design technology that serves both species while operating within commercial spaces that have their own pressures and expectations,” she said.

“What really struck me is how much interpretation matters. When cats interact with screens, they don’t follow the behavioral patterns we might expect from human users, but that doesn’t mean they’re not engaged,” she continued. However, evaluating meaningful interactions remains a challenge since they can’t ask the animals directly.

The uncertainty visitors experienced in this study pointed to a critical gap in how we’re building technology for animals, Hirskyj-Douglas said, because many animals utilize technology like smart collars and interactive games or videos at home. But, she said, “we need more effective frameworks for communicating animal engagement to human users, particularly in multispecies environments. It’s not enough to build technology for animals; we need to help humans understand and respect how animals choose to use it.”

She believes that longer-term studies and feedback from cat cafes would be needed to determine whether MewTube would be a valuable addition to the cat cafe toolkit—and they’d also need to evaluate the welfare benefits for the cats.

Overall, though, Hirskyj-Douglas sees potential.

“I see a really interesting future for cat technology, from applications used in people’s homes to cat cafes, and even in veterinary care, on how we can support cats in their everyday lives.”

 

Photo credit: Courtesy of Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas

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