Due to various reasons, pet owners tend to fail in detecting deviations from their cat’s habits. AI-based solutions might come to the rescue though. AI-based detection of diseases in an early stage reduces worsening symptoms and unnecessary, stressful vet visits for pets and owners. In addition, treating an injury or illness in an early stage might considerably reduce treatment costs. Since the idea for this start-up is of a personal nature, I am very motivated to test whether it could be successful in helping other cat owners avoiding the pain of a disease that is detected too late.

I am analyzing whether my start-up idea regarding Smart Home applications for cat owners might be successful. My dataset includes secondary as well as primary data. Quantitative and qualitative interviews were conducted among potential early adopters. Moreover, I have carried out a workshop with participants with interdisciplinary skills for my solution space. Furthermore, I conducted interviews with experts to gain insights in relevant fields. For the thesis, I adapted a well-known process for disciplined entrepreneurship based on the book by Aulet B. (2013).

In his book Disciplined Entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet discusses how a number of electronic health record startups in the 1980s failed because of a lack of interest from physicians (Aulet, 2013). A product, however logical or novel, must be picked up by potential customers to be successful (Aulet, 2013). A review of potential competitors such as Tably and Petriage shows that AI is currently employed in the industry to monitor and improve pet welfare. A review of the scientific literature has shown that convolutional neural networks are currently capable of accurately detecting health problems and distress in several animal species (Stern et al., 2015; Tuttle et al., 2018). Valletta et al., (2017) provide animal behaviorists with an overview of machine learning applications in animal behavior studies, promoting machine learning as a useful addition to the animal behaviorists’ analytical toolkit. Using the "disciplined entrepreneurship" concept, I evolved my business proposal from an initial idea to a business-worthy product concept.