Smart Collars and Tracking Trends
19th June 2026
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Are smart collars useful for tracking pet health?
Most of us are now familiar with wearable technology in human medicine and fitness world, and now we can see that similar devices are becoming increasingly common in the veterinary market. Many were originally designed for GPS tracking and activity monitoring, but more recently several have started to provide genuinely useful health data as well. Options such as Maven, Invoxia, Tractive and PetPace can now provide helpful signals in patients with cardiac disease.
These smart collars are particularly good at objectively tracking activity levels and identifying changes in sleep quality, night-time restlessness and duration of deep sleep. Some can also estimate resting respiratory rates and resting heart rates, presenting this information as trends over time rather than isolated snapshots.
Suddenly, we potentially have access to four valuable parameters, accurately tracked and graphed over months or even years:
The real power of this technology lies in the trend rather than the individual number. For example, a patient developing pulmonary oedema will often show a baseline breathing rate that gradually creeps upward over several days.
We generally advise focusing on the minimum values and the mean, as these are most likely to reflect the patient’s true baseline when they are fully relaxed. The higher “maximum” heart and respiratory rate values are less trustworthy, as they are far more likely to reflect sympathetic nervous system activation. If this baseline rises consistently, it should prompt a clinical review. A sustained SRR of more than 30 breaths per minute, or a 20% increase from a patient’s individual baseline, is a significant cause for concern. Clients should also be reassured not to panic over occasional isolated spikes in the maximum readings, as these are commonly artefactual or physiological rather than representative of the true resting baseline.
If you need help with a case, we can give you tailored advice.
It is equally important to communicate what these devices cannot do. They cannot definitively diagnose heart failure or complex arrhythmias, and they do not replace echocardiography and ECG (or Holter), which remains the gold standard for diagnosis and staging. Differentiating between a stage B1 and stage B2 patient with canine myxomatous mitral valve disease (MMVD) or a cat with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) remains critical for treatment decisions and still requires echocardiography. These devices also cannot determine whether a patient requires a change in diuretic dosage. What they can do, however, is provide compelling evidence that reassessment may be warranted.
Take-home message: Think of smart collars as smoke detectors: they cannot tell you exactly what is burning, but the presence of smoke is a strong indication that something is not right.
Are smart collars useful for tracking pet health?
How do you really monitor a patient’s heart disease once they have left the room?