Pros & Cons
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- Tracks heart rate, respiration, temperature, and calorie burn in addition to activity.
- Easy-to-understand readings.
- Water-resistant.
- Long battery life.
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- Expensive monthly or annual fee.
- Collar requires Gateway that must plug into home router.
- Web-based dashboard is only for vets.
PetPace Collar Specs
| Activity Tracking | |
| Base Station | |
| GPS Location Tracking | |
| Requires Service Plan | |
| Water Resistant | |
| Weight | 1.5 |
| Works With Cats |
Activity trackers for most pets are limited to just that: physical activity. That's how the FitBark ( at Amazon) and the Whistle —two of our favorite trackers—work. The PetPace Collar ($149.95, plus a monthly or annual fee) is a little different. Rather than just give you a wireless tag to put on a collar, the whole device is a collar, which offers room for plenty of extra sensors. It measures your dog or cat's activity, plus temperature, pulse, respiration, and even calories burned. It places emphasis on overall pet health, which makes it useful to track pets with medical issues. For healthy pets, though, you're better off saving some money with a less-involved tracker like the Whistle.
Hardware Features
The PetPace ($249.95 at Amazon) isn't a one-size-fits-all collar. It come in three sizes for dogs (Small for dogs 8 to 20 pounds, Medium for dogs 20 to 60 pounds, and Large for dogs over 60 pounds), and one size for cats (between 8 and 20 pounds). The main set of sensors sit at bottom of the collar, over your pet's ventral midline. There's a clip at the top of the collar, with an arrow that points toward your pet's nose to get the right orientation. The whole thing weighs about 1.5 ounces.
Along each side of the sensor are strips that include quarter-inch soft rubber "spikes," 22 in total, that dig into your pet's fur to get a good grip. It seems a little off-putting at first glance, but after a week of use my dog, Madison, was no worse the wear. The collar should go on tight enough so that only 2 fingers can slip under it, which seems a bit snug, but again, Maddie didn't mind as long as there were walks to be had.
The collar does not have a ring for clipping ID tags or leads or anything else. PetPace specifically notes the collar is not meant for leash-walking your dog, so it purposefully left out the ring. That mean you'll need to keep your pet's tags on a second collar or harness. The collar's electronics are not rated as fully waterproof, only water-resistant (IP-67 rating), so no letting your pet go for a swim.
The battery is rated to last up to six weeks, depending on use, so you won't have to charge the collar often. In order to juice up the lithium polymer battery, you need to remove the collar and clip it into an awkward proprietary charging cable. The upside of the clip is that it doesn't come loose, but a standard micro USB would have been sufficient.
One of the big surprises with the PetPace is that, unlike most other pet trackers, it doesn't talk to your smartphone via Bluetooth. Nor does it have Wi-Fi to send the information it collects directly to the Internet via your router. Instead, the collar can only talk to the included PetPace Gateway base station, which must be plugged into your home router. Because the Gateway is meant to stay at home and transmit data, you can monitor your pet's activity while out of the house. But if you're out for a walk with said pet, you can't access the activity data until you get back home and reconnect with the Gateway.
App Features
Most pet fitness trackers don't have a monthly or annual fee unless they also have GPS capability, like the Tagg ($97.99 at Amazon) (which is now the Whistle GPS Pet Tracker). But the PetPace doesn't have GPS, so why the extra $14.95/month (or $150 per year)? The company claims it's all about the tracking algorithm, which is performs "real-time advanced analytics on the data to accurately monitor your pet's health." That includes health reports and pet health alerts sent to your phone. An extra collar for other pets, used on the same account and with the same Gateway, costs $125; each collar still requires its own monthly or annual plan, so things can get very pricey if you own more than one pet.
A more likely reason for the added cost is because the PetPace is geared toward veterinary clinics and doctors. The setup process asks you for your vet's name, and the PetPace site has a few case studies showing how vets have used the collar to help patients (such as quantifying a dog's caloric needs after activity, or checking a cat's pain by measuring heart rate variability). Generating reports is possible with the PetPace service—but only if you're a DVM. Vets, in fact, get access to an entire Web-based dashboard of patient info if they buy into the system. Their cost: A set of 5 collars at $120 each, plus a $40 monthly service plan for each active collar. Once again, that seems a bit steep.
No Web dashboard means consumer users get access to PetPace data only via the free app for Android and iOS devices. It's displayed nicely, with each pet's page showing a gauge for pulse, respiration, and temperature, plus pictographs for activity and positions, which makes it all very easy to take in. Click any of the stats for the day/week/month to get a breakdown of the hours and percentages. Calorie burn for the day is also listed.
I happen to live with a licensed veterinary technician, who found the info interesting, but not always actionable. For instance, Madison's PetPace persistently listed her body temperature as too high, with warnings to call the vet. But considering how close she loves to sleep near the fireplace, that doesn't mean much. Second, her caloric burn lists a higher number than the amount of calories we feed her per day, which if true, means she should be a skeleton, and not the svelte little brindle she is. Still, I can see how a lot of this information can be useful, especially if your vet wants you to continually monitor a specific health metric.
Conclusions
Pet fitness trackers, like those for humans, are here to stay. If you're concered about your pet's activity levels, you're definitely going to want one; and if your pet has any medical concerns, you should give the PetPace serious consideration. Misgivings about some of its readings aside, it's detecting far more than any other pet tracker out there, and updates to the algorithm and app mean it will only get better. That said, the monthly cost is a bit steep, and casual users can pick up a more fitness-focused tracker for a lot less. The Wi-Fi-equipped Whistle, for instance, costs half the price, and doesn't require a monthly fee.