Whiskerlog
Weight, breathing rate and vet visits for your animals, in a record you can hand to a vet.
- React Native
- Expo
What it is
A health tracker for animals. It logs weight, breathing rate, vet visits and notes on a per-animal timeline, turns the numbers into trends instead of a wall of entries, and lets you hand a single animal, or a whole litter, to another person who’s caring for them: a partner taking half the measurements, a co-owner, the carer they go to next.
Why I built it
It started with fostering. A litter of kittens gets weighed every day, because daily weight is the earliest sign that one of them is in trouble, and the number only means anything next to the one from the day before. Several kittens and a notes app is a bad system, and I was the bad system.
The same thing turned out to be true at the other end of a cat’s life. Our older house cat needs a breathing rate taken at rest, and a single count of breaths per minute tells you very little. The same count measured over weeks tells a vet quite a lot. Both ends are the same problem: measurements taken conscientiously, then thrown away by the storage.
Sharing was the other half of it. Two people both take readings, the data ends up split across two phones in two formats, and at the appointment someone scrolls through photos of a handwritten list. Fostering makes that worse, because the animals move on and their history is supposed to go with them.
How it works
React Native and Expo, so both phones get the same app at the same time. The design constraint on the logging path is that recording a measurement has to take less effort than not recording it, because it happens one-handed, with the other hand on the animal. Breathing rate has a thirty-second counter you tap along with, and it knows the normal range for the species, so you get the number and what it means at the same time.
Sharing works per animal or per litter, from one account to another, so what you give away is that one litter and nothing else. There’s no household or family plan to join first, which would be the wrong shape anyway: the people who need a given litter aren’t a household, and they change. Senior animals can carry reminders, so the check actually happens.
Where it is now
In beta, and not on either store yet. There’s a waitlist on whiskerlog.app. It started as a cat thing and turned out to be general enough for other animals, which is mostly the species ranges doing the work.