‘We want to use AI to make pets healthier’: The app putting a virtual vet in every smartphone

Joii promises to take the pressure off struggling vets, as well as dramatically bring down costs for pet owners. Andy Martin speaks to its creators about how technology can revive a ‘profession in crisis’

You can use the app to help diagnose your pet from home (Joii)

Robert Dawson really has had his arm up the rear end of a cow, so I know he’s a real vet (and has been for 29 years). “I can remember one time I forgot my gloves and I had to do it au naturel,” he says.

He’s not doing it any more though, with or without gloves. I’m not saying the days of James Herriot – the All Creatures Great and Small author – are over, but Dawson and Vet-AI are bringing him bang up to date and adding on a virtual partner – one who doesn’t stick an arm anywhere, doesn’t even have an arm in fact, but can still provide you with a lot of useful info (a lot of it free, moreover).

Conscious as I am that every time I take my dog to the vet it’s another £70 – and that’s if he’s well – I can see a strong case for downloading the Vet-AI app Joii and getting him checked out online. Vet-AI is physically based in Leeds, but you can click on their expertise anywhere. If you’re ill, but can’t easily see a doctor, you might look up NHS online. If your dog is ill, you can now find the pet equivalent.

Here is the thing that shocked me when I met three of the Vet-AI team in person at the Pullman hotel in London. You know how animals get ill and you rely totally on your vet to make them better? Well, the fact is vets get sick too. I’d never stopped to think about it before.

Sarah Warren – who is married to Robert Dawson, and is the Vet-AI “chief happiness officer” – enlightened me. Fact: there are a lot of depressed vets out there. “The suicide rate among vets is more than three times the national average,” Warren tells me. “The profession is in crisis.”

It’s not just that a young vet having to euthanise a horse (for example) is likely to be fairly traumatised. And that kind of thing is happening day in day out. Vets have feelings too, otherwise they probably wouldn’t become vets in the first place. But the other thing is that their work/life balance has been tilted one way only with an increasing workload and rising client expectations.

Sick pets and depressed vets? Vet-AI could be the solution for both. The virtual vet promises to take a lot of the pressure off the flesh-and-blood kind, and at the same time dramatically bring down costs for owners. When Dawson and Warren advertised recently for a vet to join Vet-AI, they got 65 applications over one weekend. Apparently more than 50 per cent of vets are looking to change jobs.

The virtual vet promises to take a lot of the pressure off the flesh-and-blood kind, and at the same time dramatically bring down costs for owners

Robert Dawson started in a small practice in Bristol back in 1990. They expanded to more than 50 vets across 12 separate branches and acquired a pet hospital. He sold that business in 2015 and went on to join forces with co-founder Paul Hallett in 2017 to develop “telemedicine”, ie remote veterinary care over your phone or your computer. “It just made sense to me,” says Dawson.

The Joii app is free and gives you instant access to vets and huge amounts of data. Whether you have a 10-year old great dane, a pet python or a sick parrot, Joii will have encountered many comparable patients and will almost certainly know what the problem is before you do. All you have to do is click on where it hurts on the virtual dog/cat/snake on your phone, and the AI vet will give you a diagnosis.

The chief data scientist behind all the magic is Trevor Hardcastle, formerly a theoretical physicist and research fellow in computational physics at the University of Leeds. In 2018 he realised that he wanted to apply his skills to the real world and “enhance the way we live”. He thought he’d probably end up in finance but was approached by Vet-AI with a simple idea: “We want to use AI to make pets healthier”. So he turned his hand to automating veterinary care instead. He even has an equation for the probability of your dog scraping his backside along the carpet (seriously).

Robert Dawson (third from left) and his team are looking out for sick pets and under-pressure vets alike (Vet-AI)

The vets of Vet-AI are not about to use robots to carry out an op on your cat. But they do use machine learning and big data to make predictions. Prevention is better than a cure.

Hardcastle gives an example from the LA Police Department, reminiscent of Minority Report. On the basis of zip codes and times, LAPD has drawn up a (probable) crime map of the city. Something similar applies to your pet, not so much their crimes as their illnesses. The more information the better, but Joii can work out most things on the basis of a picture or a video.

The app has a handy symptom-checker. It uses the same software to check your pet for arthritis as the Chinese government uses to spot drunk drivers before they get into a car. At present, you have to see a vet to obtain the relevant medication, but Vet-AI is carrying out clinical trials to test the viability of prescribing online.

Video consultations are the future. “We find that vets are just as good in front of a laptop as they are having the pet in front of them,” says Dawson. You normally wait until your pet is ill before seeing the vet – and, in fact, sometimes not even then, depending on where you live and how flush you’re feeling. “The advantage of using the app,” says Dawson, “is that you can identify issues in advance and get the right advice on diet and exercise to head off problems before they happen.”

There is no danger of the app putting non-AI vets out of a job. Warren says that there is a national shortage of vets “and Brexit is not helping”. Fifty per cent of new vets come from mainland Europe. “Vets love the job, but they can’t do it for 50 or 60 hours a week – not without cracking up.”

Vet-AI promises to save both pets and vets at a stroke – or a click. Technology is changing the way vets work. Apparently you don’t even have to stick your arm up the rear of pregnant cows any more: now it’s more likely to be ultrasound. Maybe even James Herriot would have appreciated that. Especially if he’d forgotten his gloves.