For years, one of the inputs pet clinical trials have relied on most is a simple but limited one:  how an owner thinks their dog or cat is doing. A biweekly survey. A guess at whether the new supplement helped. That was good enough for a long time. It isn’t anymore, and pharma, supplements, pet food, and other animal health companies know it; a memory of “she seems better” doesn’t hold up when you need to prove efficacy.

That’s the gap Maven Pet and Treat are closing together. Maven Pet, the vet-co-created health monitoring system for dogs and cats, is partnering with Treat, a clinical research organization that runs pet pharmaceutical, supplement, and nutrition trials using real, home-based pets. Under the partnership, Treat is leveraging Maven’s continuous monitoring directly into its trial protocols, giving researchers 24/7 data on activity, sleep and sleep interruptions, resting respiratory rate, heart rate, itch and scratch behavior, and water intake, instead of relying on what an owner remembers to report weeks later.

Maven is already part of several of Treat’s active and completed studies, and the two companies aren’t the only ones moving in this direction. A growing number of research organizations and pet health brands are using Maven’s monitoring in their own trials and product-validation work, for the same reason: continuous, objective data is quickly becoming the standard trials are expected to meet, not a nice-to-have.

“We’re always looking for ways to improve our process and better support our hypotheses. Maven’s remote monitoring has done exactly that, giving us 24/7 data across multiple health parameters instead of a snapshot every couple of weeks.” says Emmanuel, Treat’s Founder & CEO. “We’ve worked with several devices in the past, and Maven’s Vet-first approach to product development has been extremely refreshing”

On the Maven Research Page, we can find a published example of what that data can show. In this study – Evaluation of a Mushroom-Derived Nutraceutical for Canine Cognitive Decline, researchers used the Maven Pet Health Tracker to continuously monitor sleep and activity in a subset of the study’s dogs, alongside the usual owner-reported assessments. The device caught things a survey wouldn’t have: nighttime rest interruptions dropped from an average of 20 to 11 events per night, a 45 percent reduction, and sleep efficiency climbed from 72 to 81 percent. Those are the kind of outcomes that are easy to miss if you’re only checking in with an owner every couple of weeks, and easy to prove when you’re measuring every night.

“From day one, we’ve been building unique datasets around pets, the same datasets pet owners already rely on in their daily lives. Now we’re seeing that data power real-world evidence through partnerships like this one, with companies like Treat that have always been at the vanguard of using technology in trials.” says Guilherme Coelho, Co-Founder & CEO of Maven Pet.

Partnerships like this point to where pet health research is heading: trials that run continuously, in real homes, without asking owners to fill in the gaps from memory. As more research organizations adopt that standard, the dataset Maven is building today becomes the foundation for testing the next generation of pet therapeutics.