If you’re anything like me, then you’re probably always worrying about how your pet is doing and even more, wishing you knew what Man’s best friend was thinking. Well, wonder no more as our next guest presents an amazing invention that helps you get into your pet’s head.

Petpace is a company awarded a project by the Bird Foundation which promotes innovation and business relationships between American and Israeli companies and the President & CEO of Petpace, Avi Menkes, is here with me now. Thank you so much for joining me.  

Thank you for having us.   

So, first of all, what is the Petpace collar?  

Petpace is a digital platform to promote pet health. We create a non-invasive smart collar, this is the collar, that monitors 7-dimension bio-sensing parameters. We are sensing the temperature, pulse, respiration, outward viability, which is for pain, stress & disease prediction, calories, position, and activity level. If one of the parameters goes out of bounds, an alert is going to be issued to the pet owner or to the veterinarian, either via a smartphone or via email, or via phone call.   

And how exactly does it work?  

So, we have, the collar comes in three sizes; small medium, and large, it’s non-invasive, you don’t need to shave the pet, you don’t need to do anything, you mount it on the neck of the pet, you turn it on, you plug the base station to your home router or to the office router and from that point in time, the collar starts to pick up all the vitals and creates a baseline for the pet. All the data goes to a big data on the cloud and an analytic engine starts to look at the data and find if there are any anomalies.   

Okay. So, you know, I heard you earlier mention the position. First of all, how do you measure the position of the pet?  

The sensing that we have here, consider this like a very sophisticated stethoscope. So, the pulse and respiration actually, we’re listening to the bloodstream in the neck. Then there are accelerators that access, accelerator which are measuring the movement of the pet and the position that they’re lying. So, with taught the software here, what actually a right position, left position, standing, lying on the back, urinating, eating. So, the software knows all these. So, the next question is why do we need all these positions?   

Yeah.  

Because pets are creature of habits. Since they’re creature of habits, they do the same thing all the time. So, for example, if a pet is lying on the right side most of the day, and this is like 80/90% and suddenly they stop doing it, maybe something is wrong in their right side. There’s a pain or some disease is developing. So, the system is going to fire an alert to let you know that something is wrong with the behavior of the pet.   

Wow. And you can have this hook up to anybody that you want? Like anybody who wants to see, the veterinarian?  

You hook it on the pet, then you have a digital platform that the pet owner and the veteran can share, can log in and see all the data. The pet owner see it at a certain level of high regularity but when the veterinarian will log to the cloud application, they’re going to see all the details, including all the points, data points, in order to make a more informed decision. Imagine to yourself that we can start to actually treat the pet even before they reach the office. The veterinarian can start to make some recommendation and decision even when the pet is not in the office already.   

So, okay. So, what inspired you to make this? I mean, because it sounds so simple that everybody wants to know what their pet is thinking, you know, how did you come up with a way to actually do that and why?  

Actually, I’ve been in remote sensing most of my life, I did remote sensing for objects, and one day, I decided that we need to do something for the better good. Not just object but maybe there’s somebody that needs help, that needs a voice to talk to us, to tell us what’s going on. And I started to research the subject and met doctor [inaudible], our chief veterinarian, talked with him about this and we decided that that can be a great idea and started to implement it. This happened in February 2012.   

February 2012. So, how long has this been in development?  

This has been in development for about 3 years and we went to the market in February, not in February, in Q1 2015.   

Alright. And what’s the response been like so far?    

The response is very interesting. We have two types of clients. We have clinics and veterinarians that are using it for in-clinic operation and a clinician started to purchase it for their internal operation and then, we have pet owner that are very concerned for their pets and they’re buying it online to their pets to make sure they follow up what’s happening with the pet’s life.   

What’s like the margin of error on this?  

The collar is accurate 85-90% on all its parameter. So, if there is a fever, more than likely it we’ll detect the fever. If there’s a problem with the heart and there’s high elevation, low elevation, pains, more than likely we’re going to detect it. And if one of the behavioral parameters is not in line, more than likely, we’re going to detect it and alert somebody. And we have enough documented cases that we have done it before.   

So, I understand that you have one of these on your own pet.  

Correct.   

And…  

Jake.   

Jake. And what is Jake doing right now?  

Let’s see what Jake is doing. Let me turn on my mobile phone. This is Jake. Now, it’s picking up the information about Jake, Okay? Jake actually was on a trip outside, I believe it was after my wife fed him and now, he’s back home and if I need to guess, it’s still sunlight so, he’s in the yard, walking in the yard. So, this is his activity. And if we go here, I can see actually his temperature, everything is okay, we see the graph of the temperature, we can see the graph of the pulse. As we can see Jake was walking so, we can see that the pulse went up. And we can see the same for the respiration, these are all the activity levels, the position that Jake was on, you know, you can see most of the day, Jake is lying, he’s not too active. We can see the graph here and we can see what we call Activity Score. This is when he was asleep and then, when he wakes up and he starts to get points to be active, actually active dog is good because then, they’re not gaining weight.   

Right. So, what’s one of the most surprising facts that you’ve picked up from the data?  

We picked up a very interesting information. If you look at the books, you’ll see actually that a dog pulse, for example, is usually, the golden rule is around 55-60, at the lower level. We started to put a collar on dogs, so let’s talk about Jake, and the system starts to alert us that the pulses are very low. When Jake is asleep, how pulse is 38. According to the books, it’s impossible. So, actually, the factual information from the dogs at their habitat is very different from what the books are saying because we are starting to gather a lot of medical information and we see real facts with dogs that are in their real habitat as opposed to artificial locations.  

Incredible. So, you’re actually… so, you’re like, you know, this is not just informative for an owner, the individual veterinarian but for the scope of medicine for pets.  

Exactly. Actually, we have a big data, that the data is accumulating all the vital signs and the data has never been deleted and there is millions of data that we’re receiving about pets, about breeds in different sex, different elevation, different geography. So, if you take a pet in Colorado and the same pet in Florida, they behave differently and they have different diseases because they’re influenced by the geography. And we can actually detect all these trends.   

Alright. Well, my final question is how much does it cost and where do I get it?   

The collar cost from $149.95 with one year subscription up to $219.95 with one year subscription. You can buy it online on our page, you go to the store, you push the purchase button and you go through the process and in 4 days, it will be in your doorstep. Or in a different location like in Canada, in Spain or in Australia, we have local representatives that are selling it and more countries are going to come up.   

Alright. Well, I can’t wait to get my own. Actually, you know, my dog, I can’t go anywhere without him and yeah. Thank you so much for coming in.  

Thank you for having me.