Purdue Just Put a Veterinary Expert in Your Client's Living Room

One of the most common frustrations in companion animal practice is the gap between what happens in the exam room and what happens at home. You demonstrate how to clean an ear. You show them how to give a subcutaneous injection. You walk through the nail trim technique. And then the client walks out the door and two days later calls the front desk because they cannot remember which way to hold the foot.

Purdue University's College of Veterinary Medicine just built something that lives in that gap.

What PVM Pro Tips Actually Is

In partnership with Purdue University's Spatial Computing Hub, the College of Veterinary Medicine launched PVM Pro Tips, a pet care app available for Apple Vision Pro, iPad, and iPhone. The app offers step-by-step tutorials created by Purdue veterinary professionals for companion animal owners caring for dogs, cats, horses, and birds at home.

The tutorials cover practical care tasks including nail trimming, ear cleaning, wound bandaging, and medication administration. Each tutorial includes a list of materials needed, step-by-step instructions, and visual aids designed to walk an owner through the procedure safely and correctly.

The Apple Vision Pro version of the app goes further. Using spatial computing, it creates an immersive experience where a Purdue veterinary expert guides the user through a procedure in real time while the owner is physically working with their animal. The digital instruction overlays the real-world task rather than replacing it. For a nail trim, that means the owner is holding their dog's paw while a veterinary expert is simultaneously walking them through the technique in their field of view.

The iPhone and iPad versions deliver the same expert guidance without the spatial computing layer, making the resource accessible to pet owners who do not have access to Vision Pro hardware.

Where the Idea Came From

The app originated with Sandra San Miguel, associate dean for engagement in Purdue's College of Veterinary Medicine and a professor in veterinary clinical sciences, after she attended an Apple Vision Pro demonstration and immediately began thinking about veterinary applications for the technology. She wrote a proposal to develop Vision Pro use cases for veterinary education through Purdue's Spatial Computing Hub, assembled a development team, and the app became the first Apple Vision Pro application released to the App Store from Purdue's Spatial Computing Hub program.

The clinical need behind it was articulated directly by Caroline Gillespie Harmon, clinical assistant professor of equine community practice and section head of the Purdue University Veterinary Hospital's Equine Field Service.

"Too often I find myself asking owners to record procedures or searching for videos to share with them so they have something to look back on once I've left the farm," Gillespie Harmon said. "I hope this app becomes an invaluable resource."

That is a sentiment that resonates across every species and every practice setting. The moment a veterinarian leaves the room, the owner is on their own. A reliable, expert-backed reference that lives on the device in their pocket changes that dynamic in a meaningful way.

The Educational Angle Is the Bigger Story

PVM Pro Tips is positioned as a tool for pet owners, and that is where its immediate clinical value lives. But the longer arc of what Purdue is building here points toward something more significant for the profession.

San Miguel has been direct about the dual purpose of the spatial computing initiative. The College of Veterinary Medicine is developing apps to advance how veterinary medicine is taught, not just how owners care for their animals at home. The plan is to use Apple Vision Pro in clinical skills laboratories so students can practice hands-on procedures in a real environment while simultaneously receiving digital guidance and instruction.

For veterinary education, that is a meaningful capability. The challenge of teaching procedural skills at scale has always been the tension between supervised practice and available resources. Spatial computing creates the possibility of a student working through a procedure on a real animal while a digital expert overlay provides real-time guidance, correction, and instruction without requiring a faculty member to be physically present at every station simultaneously.

Purdue is also in the process of developing an app specifically for horse owners, which is planned for release in the near future. Additional Vision Pro applications for veterinary education are in development with the goal of incorporating the technology directly into veterinary classrooms.

What This Means for the Veterinary Community

The launch of PVM Pro Tips is a small but concrete example of a larger shift happening in veterinary medicine. The technology that is being developed for consumer applications, the immersive spatial computing platforms, the hands-free instructional overlays, the on-demand expert guidance at the point of care, is beginning to move into veterinary contexts in ways that have direct implications for how practitioners communicate with clients and how students learn clinical skills.

For practicing veterinarians, an app like this does not replace the conversation in the exam room. It extends it. A client who can pull up a Purdue-built, veterinary-expert-guided tutorial at home is a client who is more likely to complete the care correctly, more likely to follow through on the treatment plan, and less likely to call the clinic because they cannot remember which ear to treat first.

For veterinary educators, the spatial computing infrastructure Purdue is building represents a genuinely different model for clinical skills training, one that scales individual expert instruction in a way the traditional lab setting cannot.

The PVM Pro Tips app is available now for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro in the App Store. The app is for informational and educational purposes only. In emergencies, owners should contact a licensed veterinarian or emergency clinic immediately.

Vet Candy covers technology, education, and clinical news for 50,000 plus veterinary professionals. myvetcandy.com