PETKIT TRACE helps connect data from smart feeders, water fountains and litter boxes with veterinary expertise to make both everyday and veterinary care more informed. Veterinary partnerships also help shape its development and potential applications across the broader pet health industry.
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — On National Cat Day, PETKIT, a global leader in smart pet care solutions, unveiled PETKIT TRACE—a connected, AI-powered pet health data platform built on the PETKIT Ecosystem. PETKIT TRACE helps connect data on feeding, drinking, litter box use and other routines with veterinary expertise, helping pet parents better understand the records available in the PETKIT App and providing meaningful context for veterinary care. The company also announced new veterinary partnerships to help guide PETKIT TRACE’s continued development, supporting the company’s overarching vision to advance a more connected pet health ecosystem in collaboration with industry partners.
“For more than 13 years, PETKIT has made everyday pet care easier through smart devices. PETKIT TRACE represents our next step in using technology to support pet health. Pets cannot tell us how they feel, but small changes in daily behavior can offer valuable clues,” said W. K. Guo, Founder of PETKIT. “By connecting those signals across routines and over time, PETKIT TRACE aims to build a more holistic picture of each pet’s health and give pet parents and veterinarians better information to support care.”
Currently, PETKIT TRACE focuses on three of a pet’s most fundamental daily routines: eating, drinking and litter box use. It creates a continuous, reviewable history of each pet’s data, helping pet parents understand what is normal, see how patterns change over time and bring clearer context to veterinary conversations. PETKIT plans to expand PETKIT TRACE to more aspects of pets’ daily lives as the PETKIT Ecosystem evolves.
Many early health signals may first appear as changes in ordinary routines: a pet may begin eating at different times, drinking more often, using the litter box differently or gradually losing weight. These patterns can develop slowly, occur when no one is watching or be difficult to attribute in a multi-pet household. Through connected devices, data that might otherwise be missed is captured, organized and preserved. This gives caregivers a clearer record of what happens at home, without relying only on occasional observation or memory.
Inside PETKIT TRACE: How It Works and the Technology Behind It
PETKIT TRACE stands for “Trend Recognition and Actionable Care Engine.” The name also refers to the traces pets leave behind in everyday routines. Built on the PETKIT ecosystem, the platform draws on integrated at-home records and veterinary expertise to support a better understanding of each pet’s daily life.
- Capture: Smart devices, such as feeders, water fountains and litter boxes, capture multiple dimensions of pets’ daily lives—from the timing, frequency and duration of activities to body weight data and behavioral events such as yowling, where supported by the device.
- Connect: PETKIT’s AI identifies individual pets and their device interactions. With records across devices brought together into pet-by-pet profiles, data from different parts of daily life can be viewed together. This is especially valuable in multi-pet households, where food or water levels and litter clumps alone do not show which pet was involved.
- Trace: These records form a long-term, reviewable history, helping caregivers understand each pet’s usual baseline, follow trends over time and see when a routine began to change.
- Support Care: Reviewing these records over time can help caregivers notice changes that may need veterinary attention.Through veterinary collaborations such as veterinarian-authored educational content, PETKIT TRACE helps caregivers better understand changes in their pets’ daily routines and make more informed care decisions. During conversations with veterinarians, caregivers can use historical records and video clips to help explain what changed, when it began and whether eating, drinking, weight, litter box use or other recorded behaviors changed during the same period, providing more specific context for veterinary evaluation and follow-up care.
Among the technologies supporting this process is PETKIT’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI), developed in-house over more than five years. Using machine learning, the technology identifies individual pets and specific behaviors. It can also flag events such as loose stool or vomiting for caregivers to review in the PETKIT app, preserving information that might otherwise have been overlooked.
The development of PETKIT AI is powered by a real-world database co-created with a global community of more than 200,000 users, more than 500,000 multimodal pet health data points and over 100 million AI training iterations.
Guided by Veterinarians. Built to Support Veterinary Care.
PETKIT’s veterinary partnerships are built around a shared ambition: to make technology more responsive to real-world pet care needs and at-home data more useful in veterinary practice. Through working closely with veterinary professionals, PETKIT aims to translate fragmented everyday pet data into actionable insights for pet parents and meaningful context for veterinary care.
Bringing Veterinary Expertise Into PETKIT TRACE’s Development
As part of the launch, PETKIT is partnering with veterinarians across feline medicine, internal medicine, nephrology and urology. Their clinical expertise and firsthand experience with PETKIT products help the company understand which at-home changes caregivers often miss or struggle to describe, what information is useful to preserve and how it can be presented more clearly. PETKIT is also working with its veterinary partners to develop veterinarian-authored educational content on chronic kidney disease, urinary tract infections and daily routines, helping caregivers understand what to watch for, what to document and when to consult a veterinary professional.
This collaboration reflects a shared belief in the importance of recognizing changes early. “As a feline specialist veterinarian, I see cases of sick cats every day where earlier intervention could have made a huge difference in both treatment cost and outcomes for patients,” said PETKIT veterinary partner Dr. Ashlie Saffire, DVM, DABVP (Feline).
Supporting Veterinary Evaluation With a More Complete At-Home History
PETKIT TRACE provides more complete at-home context for veterinary evaluation, treatment planning and follow-up care by connecting data records across daily routines over time. This reflects a shared view among PETKIT and its veterinary partners: understanding a pet’s health means considering different routines together, rather than viewing individual changes in isolation.
PETKIT veterinary partner Dr. Autumn Harris, DVM, DACVIM, DACVNU, has noted, for example, that increased drinking may be associated with several conditions, including chronic kidney disease, diabetes and hyperthyroidism. Viewed on its own, increased drinking provides limited context; considered alongside changes in urination, appetite and weight over the same period, it can provide a more holistic picture of what has been happening at home.
PETKIT TRACE helps connect data from these different routines together on a shared timeline, turning separate observations into a clearer at-home history. Beyond saying “something seems off,” pet parents can share when changes began, patterns in daily routines, weight records, and relevant videos to support a more informed conversation with their veterinarian.
Leo’s Story: From At-Home Data to Timely Emergency Care
A case shared by Dr. Saffire shows how data captured at home can support timely action. Leo, a two-year-old cat with a history of feline idiopathic cystitis, used his smart litter box more than 13 times within a few hours one morning. Some visits lasted more than six minutes. Because the pattern was far outside his normal routine, his family immediately took him to a veterinary clinic, where he was diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening urinary tract obstruction. Dr. Saffire noted that the family’s prompt action allowed the veterinary team to begin treatment within hours of the obstruction developing, ultimately saving Leo’s life.
Leo’s case shows how at-home data, caregiver awareness and veterinary expertise can work together: the smart litter box captured the unusual pattern, his family recognized the urgency, and the veterinary team diagnosed and treated the obstruction.
PETKIT TRACE is designed to strengthen the connection among pets, caregivers and veterinary professionals throughout everyday care. Continuous at-home records help caregivers follow their pets’ routines over time, while veterinarian-authored education content helps them understand changes and when to seek professional help. Veterinary input guides how those records are presented and used. This gives caregivers clearer information to share, while giving veterinary teams more context for evaluation and follow-up—supporting more timely care and bridging the gap between home and clinic.
Building a More Connected Future for Pet Health—Together
PETKIT’s longer-term ambition is to put PETKIT TRACE’s connected data capabilities to work across the broader pet health community. Through collaboration with veterinary professionals and industry partners, the company aims to explore how these capabilities can support research and inform the development of pet care solutions that respond more closely to real-world needs.
“Our vision for PETKIT TRACE extends beyond the home and the clinic. We want to build stronger connections among pet parents, veterinary teams and the broader pet health community, and work with partners to turn a deeper understanding of pets’ daily lives into solutions that address real needs,” Guo said. “By making data and insights easier to understand and apply, we hope to contribute to progress across the industry and help build a better pet health ecosystem together. This is what PETKIT means by ‘The Technology That Cares.’”
PETKIT TRACE supports this vision by creating a continuous, multidimensional data foundation from pets’ daily lives. By helping connect data from eating, drinking, litter box use, weight and other daily routines over time, PETKIT TRACE can provide a clearer view of data patterns and changes that might otherwise remain fragmented or difficult to capture.
At the individual level, these records can help pet parents make more informed care decisions and give veterinarians a clearer picture of a pet’s life at home. At a broader level, this data foundation could support future collaboration across veterinary care, research, product development and pet health services. Connected data provides the technical foundation, veterinary expertise helps identify which information is meaningful for care, and industry partners can help translate those insights into practical applications that better respond to the real-world needs of pets and the people who care for them.
To learn more, visit https://www.petkit.com/pages/petkit-health.
About PETKIT
Founded in 2013, PETKIT redefines pet care through innovative solutions built around real needs. Driven by our value, “The Technology That Cares,” we integrate AI technology to create a smarter pet care ecosystem centered on proactive, everyday pet care. From water fountains to litter boxes, our products are designed to make daily routines easier, smarter, and more connected. PETKIT has been a leader in pet tech, trusted by 6 million users across 60+ countries.
Disclosure: Dr. Ashlie Saffire and Dr. Autumn Harris are paid veterinary partners of PETKIT and are compensated for their expertise and educational content creation. They were not separately compensated for the statements included in this press release.
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