One of the biggest challenges in monitoring medical parameters of pets, for example the heart rate of a dog or cat, is how to create value or meaning out of a large amount of raw measurements. Put differently, herein lies the main challenge of mobile health, a branch of the wearable tech revolution, namely to transform data into information.
Data is a mere collection of facts or figures. In needs to be processed, organized, interpreted and structured to become information. It is the information that holds the value of meaning and context that we seek.

We are living through a great revolution – The wearable tech and quantified self revolution. This change is expanding into the pets’ world as well. We can use tiny sensors to collect huge amounts of data relating to all kinds of health attributes and well-being parameters of the dogs and cats that share our homes. Such enormous quantities of data, termed Big Data in the tech world, have the potential to provide new insights and understanding of pets’ behavior and medical conditions. But in order to achieve that we need to first transform this data into useful information.

The ability to not only collect and store the data accurately, but to interpret it and provide pet owners, veterinarians and animal care professionals with information that will be useful in improving the quality of life of pets, will likely be the determining factor in the success or failure of the many companies that venture into the field of pets health monitoring.