Purina’s Petivity pushes home monitoring into feline practice
Version 1 — Brief
Purina’s Petivity platform is making a broader case for at-home feline monitoring as a clinical tool, with Dr. Ragen T.S. McGowan highlighting in recent veterinary podcast appearances how the company’s smart litter box monitor can turn day-to-day elimination and weight data into information veterinarians can actually use. In the April 16, 2026 episode of the Veterinary Innovation Podcast, McGowan described Petivity’s monitor as a device that fits under an existing litter box and uses AI trained on more than 300,000 recorded events to track weight and elimination patterns, including in multi-cat homes. That message aligns with Purina’s longer-running positioning for Petivity, which launched the smart litter box system in September 2022 and has since expanded related at-home monitoring offerings, including a cat kidney health test. (veterinaryinnovationpodcast.com)
Why it matters: For veterinary teams, the pitch isn’t that home tech replaces diagnostics, but that it can fill in the long gaps between appointments with trend data that pet parents often can’t observe consistently on their own. Purina and Petivity materials say the system tracks changes in urination, defecation, timing, and body weight that may warrant veterinary follow-up, while a 2025 Purina Institute session featuring McGowan, Jessica Quimby, and Ashlie Saffire framed litter box monitoring as potentially useful in conditions such as feline lower urinary tract disease, chronic kidney disease, and constipation associated with CKD. That could help clinicians move conversations with cat clients from vague history-taking toward more specific questions about frequency, duration, and change over time, while still keeping expectations grounded because the device is not intended to diagnose disease. (newscenter.purina.com)
What to watch: Expect more discussion around validation, workflow integration, and how practices can separate genuinely actionable home-monitoring data from consumer pet-tech noise as products like Petivity gain visibility. (sciencedirect.com)