Tested: the Fitbit for your dog
Editor Guy Procter and spaniel Woody tried the new ‘FitBark’ activity monitor – and were in for a surprise.
I’m not sure there’s a phrase more calculated to get eyes rolling than ‘ Fitbit for your dog’. It sounds like the sort of thing you might buy after you’ve already got a treadmill for your cat and a jetski for your goldfish. Dogs need motivation to exercise like they need an aperitif before dinner; they don’t spend long looking reproachfully in mirrors and they don’t sweat over targets – and that’s a big part of why we love them. But mindful of how pedometers took over the world while I was still frozen
”it doesn't bother him and boy does it engage you.“
in a posture of disdain, I leapt at the chance to test the FitBark – a £60 bone-shaped thing I was sure would be ridiculous. In fact I was quite unprepared for how brilliant it was.
Very easy to set up and link to your smartphone, the FitBark is a waterproof activity tracker that lasts about 10 days between charges, and easily attaches to any collar. It doesn’t bother him a bit. But boy does it engage you.
Once you’ve told the FitBark app your dog’s age, weight, breed and any health conditions, it computes a (modifiable) suggested activity goal and lets you compare your dog’s play, walking and sleep levels to others of the same breed around the world (there are 8297 dogs like mine apparently; I’m happy to say I now know Woody walks more and sleeps better than most of them).
It lets you and anyone else in your dog’s ‘pack’ (family, friends, invited rivals!) know what’s going on whenever you choose to peek, and just like human activity monitors it sends you motivating little nudges and congrats via notifications. ( Your FitBit, Jawbone or Apple HealthKit-equipped device will overlay your activity with your dog’s too, creating graphs and charts of technological togetherness.) It’s satisfying knowing you’re exercising him enough and his sleeping suggests nothing’s amiss, and potentially useful to know what he’s like left at home, in the kennels or with a dog walker.
Of course you’ll be dying to point out that steps are pretty meaningless for a fourlegged, gait-changing animal, as is distance covered – since a dog can amble or sprint the same mile with very different activity levels incurred. But FitBark seems to have scienceand veterinary foundations a mile deep and its ‘ BarkPoints’ metric is based on accelerometer readings taken many times a second, which all the boffins agree is the best way to measure canine capering. (A typical cocker spaniel clocks up around 9,200 BarkPoints daily, a Border collie 8500 and golden retriever 6500; puppies do about half as many again as an adult dog.)
There are more things you can do – if you have friends with a FitBark you can set up leaderboard challenges for fun; the app will tell you distance walked too ( Woody covers about twice as many miles as I do on a walk); you can discover new friends with similar dogs and so on. In fact it has the potential to be as delightful and compulsive as any activity tracker, and its app and operation are as slick and robust as any human equivalent.
You may not think the ambition – to monitor and measure a dog’s every moment – is worth this much investment or attention, but there’s no disputing FitBark have done it beautifully. And I remember when I felt the same way about Fitbits.