This is Kefir.

He is a dog, he is loved, and he has epilepsy.

Kefir, a tan-and-black dog, looking up at the camera with his mouth open in an open doorway. — Kefir, mid-sentence.

Most of his days are gloriously unremarkable: breakfast, a walk, the warmest patch of floor, strong opinions about the door.

Then a seizure arrives — an ordinary afternoon, or four in the morning. In the same room we know in seconds. One door away we find out afterwards, and afterwards isn't good enough.

A dog like this quietly rearranges your life. You sleep with one ear open. You leave the house and spend the whole time somewhere else, running the same question: is he alright right now.

None of that is the illness. It's the not knowing.

What we're building

A real-time event stream from a real dog.

Before anything else, it is an alarm. Kefir wears a small sensor on his collar; a box in the hall listens day and night. The moment a seizure begins, a phone goes off — not a summary tomorrow, but now, while you can still get to him. It should ring through a silent switch, the way a smoke alarm does.

That part isn't finished. What runs today is everything underneath: the collar records without a break, keeps its own copy on board, and a model marks what it thinks it saw. We tell it which marks were right.

That's one rule of many. Under it sits a live feed of what your dog is doing — open enough to teach it your own dog's events, write your own rules, reach your watch or your lights. Not step counts tomorrow: the next room, now.

Kefir's collar, right now

checking

Reading the station…

One night in August · 67 movements

One recorded night. Each mark is Kefir moving in his sleep — a twitch, a dream, a turn onto the other side. No seizures here: knowing what ordinary looks like is most of the work.

Why this matters to someone besides us

A great many dogs live with epilepsy, and behind each one is a person who sleeps lightly. If this works it should be small, cheap and unremarkable — something anyone can have, not a device with a subscription. And once a dog can raise its hand, a seizure is only the first thing worth hearing about.

Homemade, early, one dog, nothing to buy. No seizure has been recorded yet — until one is, nobody can say how well this works.

If you'd like to join in

You live with an epileptic dog and would want this — say so. That decides how far it goes.
You're a vet — tell us what we're missing.
You'd build something on a feed like this — tell us what.

Or write to us

hello@kefirdog.uk

Alesha & Kefir