Tracking the activity of your dog doing agility - FitBark dog activity monitor

I recently wrote about tracking my own activity when playing tennis using a Misfit Flash activity monitor.  But what precipitated it all was getting an activity monitor for our dog and that piquing my interest in tracking my own activity.

My wife and I have a very energetic Cocker Spaniel, and realized pretty early on that we needed to find something for him to do.  My wife ended up getting into agility with him, first for fun, but now competing in agility trials, and they are both doing great.

A natural question we had was how active our dog really was.  We came across an ad for pet activity monitors, and after doing some research purchased a FitBark Dog Activity Monitor.

The small bone shaped device attaches to your dog's collar and monitors his activity just like an activity monitor you would wear does.  What makes it really useful and interesting is the app you install on your smart phone that "fetches" the data from the device and displays it for you.

The data that is retrieved is turned into points, and a daily point goal is set based on the dog's breed, age, gender, weight, etc. (but it can be overridden).  In the image above, the details for the day are displayed and then a summary of the daily totals for the week.  The green line is the daily goal, which you can see the our dog is exceeding his daily goal on a regular basis and on this day was over 50% over it.

But it isn't just the total for the day, but the hourly view you get in the chart and the break-down of how much time was spent resting, active, and playing.  The hourly view is great as we can see exactly how much activity he gets when we go for a walk or go to the park to chase the ball, or in our case how many points he gets from a run through an agility course.

The app has other features to track a "pack" of dogs, compare your dog's activity with other dogs of the same or similar breeds/sizes, share the information with friends, family, or your vet, and even link it with your own activity monitor should you go running or biking with your dog.  The app has even been updated several times in the couple of months we've been using it so they continue to enhance and improve it.

And the FitBark even collects data when you aren't home, so you can see exactly how active your dog is when no one is home.  There is even a WiFi station you can get that fetches the data while you aren't there and uploads it to the cloud so you can run the app and see the up to the minute activity and points.

We have been very pleased with the FitBark and would highly recommend it to any agility dog owner, or any dog or pet owner, as it provides new insights into the activity and health of your pet.

Do you have a FitBark or other activity monitor for your dog?  I'd love to hear your comments.

Tracking your activity when playing tennis - My experience with a Misfit Flash

This post is going to deviate a bit from discussing NTRP ratings and USTA League stats, but is still about data related to tennis.

Personal activity monitors, e.g. Fitbit, Garmin Vivo, Nike Fuel, etc. have become very popular recently.  I succumbed and got one, a Misfit Flash, in part because I'd gotten a FitBark activity monitor for my dog (see more here) and also being a data junkie, getting data about my activity is a bit intriguing.

I have not used many other activity monitors, and this is not intended to be a full review of the Flash, but it is a fairly inexpensive device does provide the basics of monitoring your steps, calories, and miles.  It also accumulates points for you and measures your progress towards a daily goal.

The points it calculates are based on a variety of factors, one being the type of activity you are doing.  You are able to track a specific activity and identify what the activity type is.  You also tell it where you are wearing the device (wrist, shoe, waist), and when you do this, it calculates your points accordingly.  For example, the same activity it monitors for a period will result in more points if you tell it you were running vs walking.

But what I really care about is what it says about playing tennis, and thankfully, there is a specific activity type for tennis.  So I mark the start and end of when I play, tell it the activity was tennis, and voila, it tells me how many points I accumulated for the activity.

The image above shows the total for a day in which I played twice for a total of about 3 hours.  There was about 1.5 hours of singles and 1.5 hours of doubles.

The image to the left shows the specific activity when I played singles on this day and you see I garnered a bunch of the points from it.

I do notice that I get more points from singles than doubles.  I probably get about 900 points per hour from doubles and 1,200-1,400 per hour from singles which all makes sense.

All in all, I'm very pleased with my Misfit Flash.  I'm sure other trackers do more and have more features, and the Flash has some quirks, for example there is no display, just a dial with LED's and a single button.  But you can monitor your daily progress, start/stop an activity, and see the time with something as simple as this.

If you use an activity tracker when playing tennis, leave a comment and let me know what your experience has been.