Review: PitPat Pet Activity Monitors

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Last month we were sent a couple of PitPat Dog Activity Monitors to try out, obviously on the dogs, not ourselves……..They arrived the day we flew to Copenhagen, so we didn’t get to try them right away, but we’ve had 3 weeks of trialing them now, so I wanted to let you know how we’ve been getting on with them!

So, off the bat, I should tell
you, in case you aren’t aware of our feral little beasts – their names are
Grandmaster Flash, and Grandmaster Melle Mel – Flash and Melle, they are 7 and
3.5 respectively, and they are Jack Russel x Pug crosses – which means they are
kind of small dogs. About 10kgs each (depending on how much they’ve eaten
lately), so I was a bit worried that the PitPat’s, although they are only
5cmx5cm, might look really big on their collars, or be quite heavy for them,
but, as you can see from the photos, they fit really nicely, and save from a
few times they scratched at them when they first went on, they pretty much
ignore them now, which is good.

We’ve now been using the PitPat
Monitors for the last few weeks. There have been hikes round the reservoirs,
there have been walks through the woods, we’ve scrambled through streams, Melle
has swum (yes, it is waterproof), Flash has chased balls, they have played with other dogs, they have
played with people. The dogs have well and truly put their trackers through
their paces!

And we love
them.

It is so so much fun checking
their data at the end of the day. And interesting. Because pretty much every
day it tells me that Flash has done more running than Melle, which is crazy
because Flash, in my eyes, is super lazy – but it tells me he does more running,
which might make sense because he dithers so much then has to sprint to catch
up with us. Whereas Melle, he’s just constantly on the go on a walk, noodling about, always on the go – but maybe not running.

And in the house Flash will relentlessly
chase the ball if he’s given the chance, where as Melle will happily cuddle you
all day, but Melle will get up and wander round the house with you every time you move, even if you try and explain you’re just getting up to grab a drink, but Flash, once he’s settled, it’ll take a lot to get Flash off his napping position on the sofa!

I knew this about them, obviously, but It really is fun, at the end of the day, checking their activity and sometimes seeing how it matches against what I’ve been doing. Because I swear there are days I’ve walked further than them, just down to the times I’ve had to go back to them and figure out what on earth they are up to!

So, now I’ve told you about how we use them, and the things we’ve found out from them. I’ll show you the actual app, because it’s so easy to use. Obviously we have 2 dogs, so our app interface has 2 dogs set up on it that we can toggle between. But each dog has their own dashboard, which we can look down and see their activity over time. And then, you can delve a bit deeper into the actual stats from a specific day.

Here you can see how their activity can vary, especially on a day, like the one at the top, when my mum has spent the day indulging Flash’s ball obsession!

This last shot shows the badges you can ‘win’ for hitting your daily activity quota, and also the screen that you hit when you want to download the data. It’s super simple to grab the data – you just click the fetch data button on the app, and push the paw on the tracker and it downloads! It is all done through Bluetooth, so I try to only download it once a day, and usually when I’ve taken their collars off for the day.

So, what do you think? Is a Pitpat the sort of thing you’d like for your dog? Because I’m currently raving about them to all the dog walkers we meet on our adventures!

(I should also say that the dogs
don’t tend to wear their collars in the house until we go on a walk, unless
they are at my parents, so sometimes the data is just based on our walks, but sometimes
it’s a full days’ worth of info.)

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