Does Your Dog Need a Smartphone?
Practically everybody has a smartphone or a fitness tracker. And it’s high time your dog got one, too.
Ridiculous, you say? Domestic dogs have been around at least since the caveman days, and they’ve never needed such connected devices before, have they?
Then again, neither did we, but humans spent $2.4 billion on fitness trackers last year. And just as people can benefit from monitoring their own exercise patterns, they could also stand to know what their doggies are up to.
With dozens of dog fitness tracking products now on the market (really), which of them, if any, are right for you and your dog? We considered three distinct functionalities — GPS, health monitoring, and video capability — to help you make this decision.
GPS trackers
If your dog has a penchant for roaming, you might want a GPS tracker. The leader of this pack, so to speak, is Tagg.
Price: $99 + $9.99/month
Weight: 1.3 ounces
Battery life: 10 days
Dog size: 10 pounds and up
From Tagg’s smartphone app, you can locate your dog at any time. You can also set a “geofence”: You define a home territory, and your phone will get an alert if your pet strays outside that area. Tagg will also send you alerts if your dog is exposed to extreme temperatures, such as if you’ve left her in the car and forgotten to roll down the windows (which you would of course never do).
According to the company, 10 million pets get lost every year. Tagg makes sense for the dog who frequently escapes or goes on walkabout, worrying his owners and inciting a search.
Fitness tracking
While Tagg also tracks periods of activity and rest, the Whistle Activity Monitor goes a step further, encouraging you to set fitness goals for your pet and to track activities over time. As they say, if your dog is overweight, you need more exercise.
Price: $99
Weight: .6 ounces
Battery life: 10 days
Dog size: 10 pounds and up
As we have seen in fitness trackers for humans, quantifying activity data motivates us to do more. So quantifying your dog’s exercise might make you prioritize and stretch out that daily walk. The company says that Whistle is for dogs 10 pounds and up, but I tried it on my Chihuahua, and she didn’t seem to mind at all.
The biggest downside in the version I tested was that it didn’t have built-in GPS — why not meet both needs in one device? But Whistle has recognized that need, and recently it acquired Tagg, so we can expect both GPS and basic health monitoring to be baked into one device, maybe as early as summer 2015.
Health monitoring
For more advanced health monitoring, well beyond fitness tracking, there’s Voyce.
Price: $299 + $10/month
Battery life: 7 days
Weight: 6 ounces
Dog size: 12-to-32-inch neck
In addition to the basic activity monitoring that Whistle offers, Voyce tracks heart rate, respiratory rate, and calories burned. By tracking this data over time, you get a much better understanding of what’s normal for your dog. You can log data related to behavior, as well as external factors such as changing your dog’s brand of food or medicines given. This is helpful if your dog gets “white-coat syndrome” at the vet; sometimes it’s hard to keep your pet calm and share relevant health trends when you go to the veterinarian. If you have specific concerns about your dog’s health, having this level of detail to share is helpful.
It can also help you, as the pet parent, to see trends in activity and health as they relate to each other, to environmental factors in your family, or to your own health. This is a serious device, and it comes with a serious price. Aside from the outsized cost, my biggest problem with Voyce is the size of the device — it’s 10 times the weight of Whistle.
Videoconferencing
Lots of parents use a baby monitor to see what their infants are doing when they’re not in the same room. Why should pet owners be denied the same fun? The Scout 5000, coming in summer 2015, will offer a dog’s-eye view of your pet’s activities in real time.
Price: $199 (3G service included for first year)
Battery life: 7 days
Dog size: 20 pounds and greater
The Scout 5000 is the closest thing yet to a canine smartphone. In addition to GPS tracking and bark detection, it can send live video from your dog’s collar to your phone. You can even talk to your dog over the cellular link. Just hope that he doesn’t put you on hold.
