[CitrusFruits]

My thought process is that any on-cat device is going to have a lot of false positives since cats' movements can be so unpredictable.

Have you considered keeping him only in one room while you are gone, and placing many cameras in the room, as well as having a more controlled lighting set up? Then you might be able to go down the video recognition path, although I have no idea if it's even really possible. At least you have some training data (like the YouTube video you linked).

[PaulHoule]

This is funny to me because I have been gentling a feral cat lately and have it in a "cat room" which has an Amcrest camera in it. He's on the threshold of feeling ready to go down to the floor when I am around so I'll see him walking around on the floor on the computer at the main house and then hear him climb up to his shelf when he hears my footsteps.

It's getting clear to me that he's got too little space to be happy and I heard his voice for the first time last night as something between a meow and a yowl which I think was him asking for a better life so I am doing everything I have to do to let him range over the rest of the house and wish I could get it done faster than I can. Video surveillance of the house though is really out of scope.

[3D30497420]

The difference between typical movements and a seizure will probably be pretty clear with the right data. I have a dog with epilepsy and his movements during a seizure are extremely different than anything else he does.

I'd wager a combination of measures may be the most effective, though not sure how easy they'd be to measure. Overall movement, heart rate, and muscle tension could probably provide a pretty accurate indicator of a seizure. Unfortunately, muscle tension is probably the most important and (I'd guess) the hardest to measure, especially through fur.

There's a decent chance that breathing and heart rate alone will be unique enough, but I'm only speculating.

Best of luck with your kitty. For what its worth, we thought we'd lose our dog years ago (many seizures per day), but have largely been able to get things under control with medication. He started at 3 years and he's now nearly 9. We really didn't expect him to get past 4 or 5, so we're very happy. Also, ironically, his medication is supposed to make him tired, but he's still border-line insane.

[latexr]

> My thought process is that any on-cat device is going to have a lot of false positives since cats' movements can be so unpredictable.

OP mentioned seizures usually last at least 3 minutes so there might be enough time for corrections (e.g. weird movements for 10 seconds then stopping may not warrant an alarm).

Having some amount of false positives might be desirable, at least at first, to calibrate expectations. Certainly many false positives are worth it when you consider a single false negative could be fatal.

[CitrusFruits]

Yeah that's fair pushback. Maybe the video approach could be a secondary confirmation then? I imagine it's pretty easy to confirm in video that the cat isnt moving location-wise, and you can cross-reference that with rapid movement detection on some sort of gyroscope enabled device.