How Does WHISTLE ™ Estimate How Far My Dog Has Traveled?

Last Update:Dec 22 2022 10:00pm

In order to estimate how far your dog has traveled WHISTLE™uses a three-axis accelerometer to sense how much your dog is moving up to 50 times per second. The information calculated is dependent on dog size, and awards more "points" to more intense movement. While these raw sensor measurements give us a lot of information about what your dog is up to, they don’t give us a direct measurement of the distance your dog has traveled.

To help us figure out how to estimate distance accurately for a wide variety of different dogs, we used the accelerometer and GPS data from walks by tens of thousands of different dogs using our Whistle device accelerometer. By pairing this information during walks we were able to create an algorithm to transform these acceleration measurements into a distance estimate. By applying this algorithm to the measurements from your Whistle device, we can then estimate the distance your dog has traveled as a result of their activity without accidentally including the distance traveled due to things like car trips.

We understand that every dog is different, and the distance your Whistle device shows you've traveled on a walk may vary from other accelerometer-equipped devices you may be measuring with. We're also constantly optimizing the algorithm so you may see slight changes over the course of time. You can find more information about why the distance measured by Whistle may be different here.