Ndigi Gichingiri Presents
ScoopFree Gen 3
Revolutionizing feline wellness through intelligent waste analytics
Background
Cat health monitoring has been a persistent challenge for pet parents, as cats instinctively hide illness symptoms until conditions become serious. Existing smart litter boxes provided poor health insights and suffered from practical issues like difficult cleaning, inadequate odor control, and prohibitive costs.
With competitors gaining market share despite these limitations and PetSafe's core patent expiring at the end of 2025, our team got to work creating a comprehensive solution that would improve health detection while helping us protect our business.
My Role
As the lead designer, I worked with various stakeholders to translate insights into features and shape the product vision. I also collaborated with mechanical engineers and industrial design on physical usability and UI elements, and designed the app features to support the device within our existing platform while using the opportunity to push our app's design language forward.
The Problem
Cats instinctively hide illness symptoms, making it challenging for pet parents to catch health issues before they worsen or become life-threatening.
The Solution
We designed a smart litter box that monitors bathroom habits, weight, and activity to spot early signs of health issues. When notable issues arise, pet parents are notified, helping them get ahead of potential problems they might've missed before it was too late.
Making daily monitoring effortless
The dashboard ensures pet parents can quickly and easily understand how long it's been since their cat last used the litter box, while providing straightforward access to device controls and tray capacity information.
Simplifying wellness checks
Rather than relying purely on charts or stats alone, health insights take on a conversational tone to contextualize changes in behavior. This makes complex health data accessible at multiple levels, from quick digestible summaries for daily check-ins to detailed analytics for pet parents who want to dive deeper into trends and patterns.
Capturing the complete picture
All events, whether from the device itself or cats using the box, are displayed to create visibility and provide reassurance. When unidentified cats appear (from guests or new additions to the household), pet parents can easily add their identity. Pet parents can also see richer insights about each bathroom event.
Staying quiet when it matters
When Sleep Mode is active, ScoopFree delays its cleaning cycle until the mode ends, essentially functioning as a traditional litter box to prevent noise while pet parents sleep.
