It happened on a Sunday morning. I was looking at my sleep score on the Samsung, a seventy-four, moderate, three interruptions, and I looked over at Biscuit on the couch and thought: I wonder how she slept.
This is not a thought I would have had before the smartwatch. The smartwatch has apparently trained me to think in metrics, and once you start thinking in metrics about one thing, the tendency spreads.
Biscuit is nine years old, which the vet has established makes her a senior dog. Senior dogs can have health things develop gradually in ways that are easy to miss until they are not easy to miss. I know this. I have been paying more attention to her since the vet used that word, watching how she moves on the stairs, how she gets up from the floor, whether the morning walk is landing differently. I am doing this with my eyes, which is imprecise.
There are apparently devices that do this more precisely.
I spent an evening looking into them, which is how I spend evenings now that my son has made me comfortable with the idea that technology can be useful rather than just confusing. What I found was a category of product I had not known existed: GPS smart collars and health monitors for dogs, and they are more sophisticated than I expected.
The Fi Series 3 is a collar with GPS tracking and activity monitoring. Battery life up to three months, which is the first number that made me stop and read more carefully, because three months is the difference between a device I might actually remember to maintain and one I will forget to charge until it stops working. It tracks steps, rest, and location. It sends alerts if Rusty, who is the escape risk, if there is one between the two of them, leaves a zone I define.
The Whistle Health and GPS tracks activity and sleep, but also behaviors like scratching and licking, which can indicate health issues before they show up in other ways. Twenty-day battery. This one appealed to me for Biscuit specifically, because a device that notices something changing before I notice something changing is exactly what a slightly nervous owner of a senior dog might want.
The Biotracker 2026 is the most ambitious of what I found. Six biomarkers, heart rate, respiratory rate, and others, monitored continuously, with an AI system that interprets the data and flags patterns that might indicate something worth looking at. Two-to-five day battery, which is the number that stopped me. Two to five days. I am the man who left his phone at six percent charge twice last week because I forgot to plug it in. A health monitor that needs charging every few days is a health monitor I will fail.
Then there is the Fi Ultra, which tracks via Starlink satellites, meaning it works in areas where there is no cell coverage. I do not take my dogs to areas without cell coverage. I found this impressive in a way that was not relevant to my situation.
The subscription costs are the other thing. Most of these require monthly fees on top of the device cost. I am already paying for three streaming services, one of which I subscribed to for a single show and have not canceled, and the AARP fuel rewards I signed up for and do use. Adding a monthly fee for a dog collar is a decision that requires more thought than one evening provides.
I have not decided. I am leaning toward one of the health monitors for Biscuit, because she is nine and the vet used the word senior and I would like to know earlier rather than later if something is changing. The battery situation is the main obstacle. Rusty I am less concerned about in health terms, beagles are generally sturdy, and his main risk is finding something he should not eat, which no collar is going to help with.
Probably going to call my son about this. He can be as nebby about it as he likes, that is what sons are for. He sent me the Samsung, he can have an opinion on the dog tracker.
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Hey, thanks for stopping by. This is just a place where I write about everything I’ve tried lately: old watches, the dogs, movies, interesting sports games, and any new app or website that catches my eye. Just one guy’s take, nothing more
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