Database to track my pet's health

fspatt · September 2, 2025, 9:24am

Hello all,

I’m looking for an easy way to track the health of my pet. This includes the different kinds of foods he eats (dropdown list preferably), how many times he uses his litter box, and if he has hairball issues. I’d like to just use a form but each day, the data needs to reset automatically to defaults but stores the info in a database of some sort. Ideally like a spreadsheet view that I could put on a separate card.

I’ve begone some work and I can collect data, but don’t know how to store or review the history. I’ve attached a screen shot of the collection options, but need help with the daily reset to zero and the storing of yesterday’s data to a database with history view.

Anyone done anything similar to this that I can modify?

Thanks,

tom_l · September 2, 2025, 11:09am

I’m not sure home automation software is the best fit for your needs. Have you looked at the available pet heath tracking apps? 10 Best Apps to Track Your Pet's Health: Keeping Your Pet Healthy

fspatt · September 2, 2025, 11:31am

Thanks @tom_l. I will check these out. I’m trying to limit the number of apps that are on our phones and would rather have it on my ha. Might have to use another db in a VM or something.

smithbill17 · March 24, 2026, 1:17pm

This is an interesting topic.

I too was looking around for some kind of application that would allow me to track some basic details of my cats (mainly because I’ve signed-up to be a Cat Fosterer at Cats Protection) along with a basic log of feeding & weight.

I looked at hundreds of different phone based apps in the Google PlayStore and concluded 99% of them were junk. Boop was not too bad, but it didn’t include a meal log or PDF export/report function.

I use Home Assistant for all my home automation & was hoping to find a suitable ‘app’ within HACS so I could self-host a suitable mini database tailored to logging pet records, but there was nothing.

I did find a few Docker apps, which could probably be hosted within a HA host or on a Raspberry Pi of it’s own. This one (RobiPet) looked promising:

but I must report that I haven’t actually tried it yet. I haven’t tried it, because I’ve recently discovered AI based coding tools that will ‘build’ you an app, if you simply type in a few words describing what you want. I quickly discovered that the ‘apps’ they build really are quite good & easily good enough for my purposes. There are quite a few of these tools, such as Base44, Replit and Lovable AI. I liked Lovable AI best and it’s built me an excellent (but simple) app for cat records management.

Now, the only issue with these code builder tools, is that they are hosted on their website. I believe you can migrate them to external sites such as GitHub & then maintain the code there. I don’t have the skills to make that work.

So, maintaining your app on the code builder sites is fine, but obviously they want you to pay a subscription. They all provide a free tier, but I believe if you don’t regularly use your free tier app, then it could be deleted after a period of inactivity. I did read some suggestions that you could regularly ‘ping’ your app web URL just to ensure it remains alive - I don’t know if this actually works, but I’ve setup Uptime Kuma to ping my Lovable AI free-tier app URL daily, and hopefully that will ensure it doesn’t get deleted.

My Lovable AI app includes a PDF export feature, so at least I can use a manual backup of my cat data.

I’ll now try ‘embedding’ my Lovable AI app URL into a Home Assistant webpage card so it gives my easy access from within my HA Companion app.

UPDATE: I couldn’t embed my Lovable AI app URL into a Home Assistant webpage dashboard - it requires a user login to access the app (I think it’s to do with security certificates & cookies and stuff that’s beyond my skills). No matter, I can forego accessing it from within HA.

smithbill17 · March 25, 2026, 4:03am

Just for completeness, I’ve now installed a RobiPet container in my ZimaOS host and it works very well & is well presented.

It has a few issues & missing features (which I’ve logged as GitHub issues), but it is actually very robust & well polished already.

fspatt · March 25, 2026, 5:17am

Great feedback! Did you happen to notice if you can track daily activities (i.e. food types, litter box usage, outside walks) either built in or if there are customizations?

I took your suggestion and asked AI to create a specific HA integration and custom dashboard card but haven’t had the time yet to try it out. I’ll have to let you know how it works with screenshots.

smithbill17 · March 25, 2026, 9:16am

No, in RobiPet you can’t log these kinds of Daily Activities. The things you can record for your pet are as shown in the left menu of this image:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Anghios/robipet/refs/heads/main/public/ghimages/4.png

You can upload PDF documents into RobiPet, which is a great feature to have. But unfortunately there are no pet ‘reports’ so you have to rely on the browser ‘print as PDF’ feature.

I’ll be very interested to know if Lovable AI (or whichever AI builder you’re using) can build an actual Home Assistant integration - I would imagine it would need to understand a great deal about the HA environment & structure to work successfully? Where would it store it’s data?

smithbill17 · March 25, 2026, 10:05am

I found various apps/code in GitHub:

Vetrack-AI
PetPatrol
Wiggles
pet-diary
Pet-Care-App

I have no idea what these are like or even how to deploy them. The description of Vetrack-AI sounded interesting, but I am unable to try it.

fspatt · March 27, 2026, 5:07pm

Hello Bill, I’ve used Microsoft Copilot and created my integration. It did a good job with several iterations until I have something I think is usable for me. I’m not sure what else is out there but this meets my needs.