Within the app, you can add safe zones, more pets using Fi trackers, and other users who can also monitor and track the pet. There’s a Health tab where you can add and save things like vet records, receipts and insurance information, and add vets to easily share your pet’s documents and get appointment reminders. You can also set up a Fi app on yours Apple Watch have faster access to track your pet’s location, activity and safety (including Lost Status) without the need for a phone.
When you open the app, you’ll see a map with live tracking showing where your pet is now, as well as a notification of the last time they were outside and where they were. With the latter, you can find statistics such as a calendar of locations, showing where they are and when. If you dive in any day when the tracker left home, it will recreate the route, follow the path and calculate the distance the pet traveled.
There’s also health tracking data from activity and sleep tracking, which is especially useful for an indoor-only pet like mine. Like other health tracking collars, sleep and activity statistics are not 100 percent accurate, as the app uses GPS to track movement, classifying “activity” when the animal is walking and “sleeping” when the animal is still for long periods of time. This means that if Basil was awake but still, the software could incorrectly classify this as sleep.
.png)
Fi Mini App source Molly Higgins
In the Rest tab, you can see sleep metrics, including a daily summary of deep sleep, falling asleep and interruptions during the night’s sleep. You can compare this over time, and the program notes how much Basil slept more or less than the previous night. It also compares data historically, by week, month and year, so you can track trends and better understand your pet’s normal sleep schedule.
The Activity tab is similar, tracking activity by day, week, and month, noting in the day’s timeline when the pet was most active and for how long. This also compares activity with the previous day. I liked looking at the weekly report, comparing the days of the week to see which one he was working on the most and if any patterns in activity emerged.
For example, I noticed that his sleep vs. activity schedule was similar to mine, except he was active between 4:45 and 6:30 a.m. (while I was still asleep), because that’s when his autofeed goes off for breakfast and my partner gets ready to leave for work. He was busy in the evenings, when I feed him dinner, have special playtime, and my roommates are at home, so there is more activity to keep him awake. Historical comparisons are also a very useful way to monitor whether your pet is sleeping more or feeling more lethargic—an early sign of a serious health problem.
Not Without His Thoughts
Since my cat is indoor only, I did some testing to track the location, using the GPS on the Fi Mini tracker and my phone. I also asked a friend to take out a tracker without my phone nearby to see if I could sense that “Basil” had left the safe zone.
While it’s better than no alert at all, the Fi GPS has some limitations (as does the Traktive tracker I tested). It needs a strong signal to communicate with cell towers for the correct location. If your phone is close to the smart collar (via Bluetooth), it uses that instead of the Fi’s GPS, making it more accurate and delivering notifications faster. If the pet gets loose and is out of range of your phone, it uses the collar’s cellular antenna (in this case, Verizon cell towers). But because the Fi antenna isn’t as strong as a phone’s, location accuracy is limited, and the connection can be very spotty, especially if your pet is out in the country or on acres where cell towers are farther away.
