Furry Feeder
Saving fat cats from an early grave
In the US there are 60 Million cats, 60% of whom are overweight or obese. Now you can call it fluffy, chunky, or even just cute, but this is a silent epidemic cutting cat’s lifespans in half. Our product, the Furry Feeder, helps to get these fat cats back to a healthy weight by adding specialized portion control, something severely lacking in many households across America. By using the Furry Feeder your cat’s health is no longer a mystery. It is understandable information on your phone.
The Dance
Aggies Invent is a 48 design competition that brings together students from all disciplines to solve real industry problems. It is also where the Furry Feeder was born.
In January 2021, Aggies Invent hosted its “Invent for Vet Med” competition where I would form a team of 6 fellow makers, made up of mechanical and biomedical engineers to be, young freshman, and even a Vet student. Due to the pandemic, this weekend-long competition was run entirely over Microsoft Teams, but that didn’t stop us from developing a solution to the cat feeding problem many cats owners face today.
The Problem
Being a senior mechanical engineer, I took charge of designing our cat feeding solution. As a team, we began the weekend by looking into the shortcomings of the current market of automatic cat feeders and what should be improved upon. Almost all automatic cat feeders we found had severely limited storage, weren’t customizable and often left the owners feeling like villains.
The Doing
The team decided that an automatic cat food dispenser that would vary the amount of food poured on a customizable schedule would be a great start to fixing the fat cat epidemic. A great solution to be fair, but not one that’s highly innovative or original, one of the main judging criteria at Aggies Invent. Because of this, the group reached out to some of the mentors for help in recontextualizing our problem. One of the mentors was a cat owner herself (unlike anyone on the team) and told us a story of how when she tried an automatic feeder it worked great, except when she saw her cat constantly looking hungry and misbehaving as an act of rebellion against the machine that now controlled its life.
This is when we realized what we were missing, the human. Pets feeders are not a “set it and forget” system because pet owners don’t always do what is most logical. So we decided that an App would greatly improve our system and give the owner all the data they need to see that their cat is making great progress towards their healthy weight goals. Numbers don’t motivate everyone, however, so social competitiveness with fellow cat owners was also integrated into the system.
The Deal
Aggie Invent ends with a final presentation that is judged based on the idea’s innovation, utility, and practicality. For the Furry Feeder presentation, we made a 90-second pitch and presentation that detailed how the Furry Feeder system would work and how it could be turned into a real product.
After 48 hours of hard work, the Furry Feeder design earned the team 2nd place!
