Technology: If you look at some of my previous posts you’ll notice I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it.

Digital radiography? Love it

Twitter? What? Never done it.

And I’m always a sucker for online gadgetry that will help my golf game.

Here’s a device and website we are starting to like a lot. It’s called Voyce and you can read about it here: Voyce: It’s a collar that monitors your dog’s vital functions; like heart rate, respirations, activity levels and calorie burn. It’s a bit like a Fitbit for dogs that helps us to monitor patients that are suffering from chronic problems.

The collars only come in sizes for dogs larger than 15-20 lbs. and the company is marketing them to pet owners along the same lines an exercise wearable like the Apple iWatch or FitBit.

We have a couple patients wearing them right now. Once you sign up and get the collar we will receive an e-mail every morning from the company with your dog’s daily activity level. You will too. You can see it on your desktop, smart phone or tablet. In addition, we will get “alerts” if something odd shows up. We can set the parameters we want to measure and customize the values for your dog’s unique lifestyle and activity level.

Recently I came in on a Monday morning and noted one of our patients vitals had spiked over the weekend. I immediately contacted the owners and found out they had boarded their dog over the weekend. Obviously that was more stressful and caused the values to spike. She was fine, but it was a great example of our seeing something that might have suggested our patient was taking a turn for the worse.

We think the Voyce collar is a terrific monitoring system for older dogs and especially for those that have chronic, debilitating conditions. The collar helps us fine tune our treatments and alerts us to when we may have to make adjustments.

You can buy the collars outright or lease them on a monthly basis. You can get them directly from the company or through our office. We have them in stock. The cost is pretty reasonable and it’s the same whether you get it directly from them or us.

See what you think.