The WIRED Reviews team loves smart rings. These wearable health-monitoring devices can track important health metrics like activity, heart rate, and sleep, and you can easily review results on the connected app without needing a cumbersome screen, as you would with a smartwatch or fitness tracker. Now enter: A wearable smart tracker for your pet.
Many pet tech companies are integrating these popular health-monitoring features for humans with trackers, popular for locating your pet in case it gets lost, or is just in your backyard. These devices promise to bring GPS-enabled location tracking, sleep and activity tracking, and alerts when activity or sleep patterns change. I’ve been testing several for a forthcoming guide to pet health collars, and the one I still come back to is my first-tested Tractive Smart Cat Tracker (also called Tractive Cat Mini). This is such an interesting way to more closely monitor and understand my pet’s day-to-day activities and habits.
You’ll need to get a corresponding plan to access things like GPS location tracking, live tracking, activity and sleep monitoring, family sharing, worldwide coverage, and more. My cat is a bit overweight (we’re working on it!), and I loved how Tractive compared mine to cats of similar age and weight to make a personalized daily activity goal. Through the app, you’ll be able to see other users’ pets and compare their goals with yours. The sleep feature acts similarly, monitoring sleep duration and breaking it down into categories of night sleep, day sleep, and calm; and each day it logs night and day sleep with their calm time, and compares it against the pet’s average.
The Tractive Smart Dog Tracker has more comprehensive health features, including bark alerts, heart and respiratory rate, and lasts up to two weeks on battery-saving mode.
Even if you have an indoor-only cat like me, I still found this health tracker to be super useful in better understanding my cat’s day-to-day levels of sleep and activity, and comparing them historically. The app gives weekly recaps and alerts if activity or sleep irregularities occur, making it even easier to know right away if something is amiss. Plus, if my cat were to ever escape, I could track their location via GPS.
Normally inexpensive, at 40 percent off, it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.
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