I have an old Fitbit Blaze from before I got an Apple Watch and after attempting to give it to “The Dude”, I decided that placing it on “The Pupster” would be an amazing idea.

Introducing “The Pupster”

For those of you who don’t know, I have an 16 month old German & Australian Shepherd that I call “The Pupster”. He is extremely active, and I often wonder about his activity level, heart rate, and sleep patterns.  Slowly, I started to realize that people often place their personal fitness trackers on the family dog to increase their steps. Also, I ran across an article where someone talked about how having a fitness tracker helped to detect her pets illness before it killed him, I decided it might be worth my time.

Fitbit on The Pupster

I did an extensive search of Etsy attempting to locate a sleeve or something so I could attach it to his collar and came up empty. So I decided to just place the whole band on his collar and reset the tracker so that I am only receiving the information as it relates to the dog.

Within 20 minutes of attaching the tracker to his collar, the Pupster had racked up 550 steps with a heart rate of 140 beats per minute. While the heart rate may be wildly incorrect, I am pretty sure he racked up those steps because as I said he is pretty active and The Dude took this time to have a play session with the dog.

Accuracy of the Fitbit

At this point the tracker appears to be fairly accurate. While I can’t seem to get it to record his sleep habits, the activity level graph gives me a pretty good idea of when he is asleep and when he isn’t. I want to try this out for a couple more weeks before I make the decision on buying a dog specific fitness tracker like Whistle, FitBark, or Findster Duo +. It will be interesting to get a decent idea of what is going on with him while I am at work.

Have any of you purchased a fitness tracker for your pet? Which one do you like? Let me know in the comments.

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