Pet health monitoring:
vital signs & HRV, explained.

Heart rate is the most familiar vital sign, and one of the most informative. A healthy resting heart rate depends on species, size and age.

• Dogs · large breed
  60 – 100 bpm
• Dogs · small breed
  100 – 140 bpm
• Puppies
  120 – 160 bpm
• Cats
  140 – 220 bpm

A single high reading rarely means much. A steady drift — a dog whose resting rate climbs 15 bpm over two weeks, or a cat whose night-time rate stops dipping — is worth a conversation with your vet. Trends tell the story, not spot values.

Normal body temperature sits between 38.3°C and 39.2°C (101–102.5°F) for both dogs and cats. Anything above 39.5°C or below 37.5°C deserves attention.

What matters more than any single reading is the pattern. Healthy pets have a subtle daily rhythm — slightly cooler in the early morning, warmer after activity. A flattened rhythm, or a slow upward creep across days, can precede visible illness by 24–72 hours.

Count breaths while your pet is fully asleep. Resting respiratory rate is one of the earliest indicators of cardiac or respiratory strain, especially in older pets.

• Dogs at rest
  10 – 30 breaths/min
• Cats at rest
  20 – 30 breaths/min

A sustained resting rate above 40 breaths per minute in a sleeping dog or cat warrants a same-week vet visit — even if nothing else seems wrong.

HRV is the tiny, moment-to-moment variation in the interval between heartbeats. Counter-intuitively, a higher HRV is a sign of a healthier, better regulated nervous system. Low HRV suggests the body is under strain — physical, emotional, or both.

In humans, HRV is now a standard wellness metric. In pets, it's only recently become measurable at home through continuous sensing. In dogs and cats it can reflect:

• Recovery. HRV rebounds overnight as the parasympathetic ("rest and digest") system takes over. A pet that isn't recovering will show a flatter overnight HRV curve.
• Stress. Chronic anxiety, pain or environmental stress suppresses HRV long before it changes behaviour you'd notice.
• Early illness. Systemic inflammation, cardiac disease and endocrine changes often show as reduced HRV days before other symptoms.
• Fitness. Active, well-conditioned pets tend toward higher baseline HRV — the same principle athletes track in themselves.

HRV is a trend metric, not a spot check. Its power is in the baseline — you learn what "normal" looks like for your pet, then notice when it drifts.

A vet visit is a single snapshot. Your pet is stressed, the room is unfamiliar, and every number reads a little high. Continuous monitoring flips this: instead of one reading, you have thousands, collected in the environment where your pet actually lives.

That's what makes early detection possible. Kidney disease, cardiac issues, chronic pain and endocrine disorders all typically show up in vital-sign patterns weeks before they become visible to the eye. Catching them early usually means a simpler, cheaper, and far more successful path forward.

Kyvo continuously measures heart rate, HRV, temperature, activity and sleep from a lightweight collar, then uses AI to learn what's normal for your pet. When patterns start to drift, you get a plain-English heads-up — not a wall of charts.

Kyvo doesn't replace your vet. It gives you the context to have better conversations with them, earlier.