2023 in pet IoT — a new house, and the year the data started to matter
End of 2023. Move-in year, and the year Atom turned ten. Both of those matter, but the second one is the one that changed what this notebook is about. For a decade I've been putting gear on healthy animals and collecting data because I could. This year the data did something — it noticed Atom slowing down before I was willing to.
Scoring the 2022 forecast
| # | Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mars acquires another notable player | 80% | Champion Petfoods (Orijen/Acana) closed in February, plus smaller deals | ✓ |
| 2 | A credible AI behavior product ships | 65% | Furbo Dog Nanny + Companion both mostly theater | ✗ |
| 3 | Atom's baseline shows real drift (turns 10) | 70% | Yes — a sustained activity drop and broken sleep, mid-year | ✓ |
| 4 | Move into the new build, redesign the layout | 95% | Done, October | ✓ |
| 5 | Petivity changes its model (acquired or adds a fee) | 50% | No — still no subscription | ✗ |
| 6 | A non-Mars/non-Purina health tracker launches | 45% | Nothing credible | ✗ |
| 7 | More Halo-class GPS shock-fences ship | 60% | A few small competitors, same welfare problem | ✓ |
| 8 | First credible Matter-compatible pet device | 50% | Matter hubs (Aqara and others) handle some pet gear, but nothing pet-specific | ✗ (partial) |
Four hits, one partial — call it ~56%, my worst year on this scorecard. But the one that mattered most, bet 3, landed — and I'd have traded all the others to be wrong about it. More below.
What entered the house this year
- A new house (October) — and for the first time I designed the pet IoT from the studs: 42 wired network drops, conduit run before drywall, a ventilated litter closet with the litter boxes and their sensors in one place. A decade of retrofits, finally a chance to do it deliberately.
- A Litter-Robot 4 (one unit; a second still on order for the upstairs). The 4 is a real step up from the III — quieter, better weight sensing, more reliable per-visit data.
- A second SureFlap door at the new back entry; the original moved to the patio.
- A vet visit for Atom that the collar effectively scheduled. Whistle Health doesn't measure heart rate — it watches behavior — and what it watched this summer was a steady drop in Atom's activity and more broken sleep over several weeks. That nudged me to book a check-up earlier than his annual. The vet, with a stethoscope — the actual instrument — heard a mitral murmur, the common senior-Lab heart thing. Lifestyle changes and monitoring for now; no medication yet.
What worked
Whistle Health's behavioral signals earned their keep for the first time. Not by doing anything fancy — by noticing, across weeks, that Atom was moving less and sleeping worse, and surfacing it as a trend instead of a vibe. I'd been half-seeing it and half-explaining it away ("he's just getting older"). The trace didn't let me. That's the whole value proposition of a long boring baseline: it catches the slow change you rationalize. The collar didn't diagnose anything — it can't, and it shouldn't pretend to — but it got us to the vet a couple months earlier, and for a heart issue that monitoring window matters.
The new house's pet infrastructure is the quality-of-life win I waited a decade for. The litter closet alone — both robots, ventilated, sensors wired, out of the living space — is worth the whole exercise.
Petivity's per-cat attribution keeps doing its job: it agrees with my own weight-script the large majority of the time, and the disagreements are still the near-identical-weight visits nothing can call.
What didn't
The Litter-Robot 4's cycle timing is more aggressive than the III's, and the cats were briefly confused by a box that tidied itself while they were still thinking about it. Settled down after a couple weeks.
The "AI behavior detection" pitch, again. I tested it properly this year and turned all of it off. The data underneath is real; the interpretation layer is theater.
Forecast for 2024 — bets, with how sure I am
| # | What I expect in 2024 | Confidence | Read or wish? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | More pet trackers join Apple's Find My network | 70% | Read — the program's open; pets are an obvious fit |
| 2 | Atom's heart needs active monitoring, maybe medication | 65% | Read I'd rather be wrong about |
| 3 | A non-Mars/non-Purina health tracker finally launches | 35% | Wish — fifth year running |
| 4 | Mars Petcare buys another competitor | 80% | Read — it hasn't slowed once |
| 5 | A consumer product does multi-pet ID by RFID, not inference | 50% | Coin-flip — the obvious fix nobody ships |
| 6 | Halo restructures or pivots under the welfare pressure | 35% | Wish, mostly |
| 7 | Atom's eleventh year brings the hard conversations | 75% | Read — and the one I most want to push off |
| 8 | A DIY ESP32 feeder matures into a real homebrew project | 65% | Read — the vendor-cloud lesson is sinking in community-wide |
The two bets I care about aren't the product ones. They're 2 and 7 — Atom. After ten years of writing about gadgets, the forecast that matters is about a dog's heart, and I'm hoping the high-confidence reads on that one are the ones I get wrong.
What I'm buying in 2024
- More attention to Atom's data, not more devices — there's still only Whistle on the behavioral side, so it's the same collar and a closer eye on the trend, plus whatever the vet wants to track.
- A DIY ESP32 feeder I build myself — vendor-cloud-independent, because Petnet taught me what happens when a feeder's brain lives on someone else's servers and the someone else folds.
- Whatever pet tracker joins Apple's Find My in a credible way, if one does.
What's next
2024 is Atom's year, and I already know it. A senior dog with a heart murmur turns a decade of decorative data into something load-bearing — the activity trend, the sleep trace, the "is today a worse day" question I used to ask casually and now ask carefully. The category I've documented for ten years is finally going to be tested for the thing it was always supposed to be for: noticing, early, when an animal you love starts to change. I'd rather it had stayed a hobby. It didn't. So I'll write that year honestly too.