If you’re looking for free, on-demand digestive health support for your beloved Fido, DIG Labs is the answer.
Co-founded by Tara Zedayko, Jessica Chu, and Nicole Scalamandre, DIG Labs is an app that allows dog parents to get personalized health and nutrition recommendations for their dog — all with just 1 photo.
Aiming to provide an affordable and accessible method to enhance each beloved furbaby’s unique health, Jessica said,
“We’re innovating all around the power of our dog’s poop to be able to enable dog owners to have better insights and better care for their dogs to live happier and longer lives.”
Getting DIG Labs Under Way
As shown on their website, DIG Labs gives free expert advice for pet parents to ensure that they help their canine companions to have happier tummies and better health.
According to Tara,
“What inspired me to start DIG Labs was my pet. At the time, I had a ten-year-old Shepherd Husky rescue named Sammy who had unexplained digestive issues… And what really frustrated me was the lack of options available to pets and their pet parents.”
After feeling disheartened by the lack of choices in the animal care space, Tara, who spent 14 years of her professional career with Johnson & Johnson, teamed up with Jessica to create similar solutions for dogs.
Both women explained,
“DIG Labs creates a way for pet parents to know on-demand and in real time how their pets’ internal health is doing. We do that by taking a look at the most overlooked and underestimated part of owning a pet, which is their poop. We’ve actually developed technology that takes stool photos and provides unique insights based on each dog. That can help pet parents either make nutrition tips, know when to go to the vet, no one to keep monitoring, and then also provide additional enrichment ideas to keep our pets happier and healthier.”
With the assistance of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer vision, the DIG Labs team has enriched the app to become full of tons of metadata about the dogs’ case conditions. This way, they are able to synthesize everything and help scale the immense knowledge that they have collected and share it with dog parents in real time.
The Amazing App That Is DIG Labs
According to the founders, what’s really exciting about the DIG Labs technology is it has the ability to provide real-time diagnostics in the world of pet health.
“…Our pets obviously can’t tell us themselves what’s wrong nor communicate with their pet parents and with their providers… So, the ultimate goal is for us to be the one-stop hub for your pets’ health from a visual standpoint,”
Tara added.
For the company, starting with canine stool is important because it provides the best window into internal health.
Basically, they help dogs with tummy troubles to feel better, faster. The idea is that if a dog mom notices that their dog has diarrhea or that their poop is abnormal-looking, they can snap a photo and send it to DIG Labs.
The team also has experts standing by who can help chat with pet parents to help triage what to do next.
For instance, they help clarify whether a home remedy is sufficient or if they need to go to the vet. They also advise on whether there’s anything else that they can provide to really help pet parents get to answers and solutions much more quickly and avoid unnecessary vet visits and other expensive, time-consuming processes that don’t necessarily lead to answers.
“By no means are we a veterinary service. By no means do we diagnose disease. We’re meant to be that support and that guide for how to correctly take the right next steps…”
By having this technology in your pocket anywhere, anytime, DIG Labs is enabling veterinarians and dog owners to have a comprehensive, more longitudinal look into digestive health.
“A lot of times…there are undiagnosed issues that go on because there are tummy troubles that come up intermittently. They are chronic, but if you don’t start to get that pattern recognition, and by having our technology, we help to hopefully catch those issues sooner so that way there can be a resolution and that can be flagged to the veterinarian and worked on,”
Jessica said.
Learn more about DIG Labs:
Check out their website at https://getdiglabs.com/.
