Jade Read, cofounder of Peekaboo Labs, tells WLM readers about the trend that turns baby monitors high tech.
You may have heard of the quantified self. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, seven in ten US adults track a health indicator—most commonly weight, diet or exercise regime—for themselves or a loved one. Of those, 21 percent use some form of technology to record the data, bedecked with wristbands like Jawbone Up, Nike+ or Fitbit and obsessed with everything from calorie counting to mood monitoring. What’s more, many of those surveyed reported that this activity has changed their overall approach to health. Knowledge is power, and knowledge about oneself translates as a tool for self-improvement.
It seems inevitable, then, that these dedicated “self-quantifiers” would take a similarly data-driven approach to parenting. You guessed it . . . the quantified baby has been born! These high-tech helicopter parents record everything their baby does, right down to the last poopy nappy. And they think it makes them better parents.
‘Appy Baby
The most ubiquitous form of tracking takes place in logging apps such as Baby Connect, Baby ESP, iBaby and BabyLog. These are just a handful of such available—a quick search on the app store returns 20-plus results, all offering much the same thing: easy collection of daily sleeps, feeds and nappy changes, as well as description of moods, activities and more. Baby Connect alone has had a staggering 100 million events recorded in it, and this number is growing rapidly. The trouble with these, though, is that they require the time and effort of sleep-deprived parents to maintain.
This simple problem has inspired a whole range of new “smart” products that are driven by automatic data collection. They collect some but not all of the same data, focusing more on the monitoring of vital signs with the aim of minimising SIDS risk. The Mimo baby monitor, for example, is a cotton babygro equipped with a multitude of sensors that show a baby’s breathing, skin temperature, body position, and activity level in real time on a smartphone. Sproutling have announced their plans for a stretchy anklet that collects all the same things as the Mimo plus heart rate, temperature of the room and even ambient light level, and the Owlet sock is much the same.
The vision in the future is to have a whole range of smart baby products that track all the useful data, creating a powerful “Internet of Things” that requires zero input from the parents. Milk bottles that track when they were picked up and how much milk was dispensed, mattresses with built in sensors to record sleeping patterns, and diapers that can forewarn you of infections detected in the urine.
Analyse This
Even the current apps and smart products collect data that can be of real benefit to parents when analysed appropriately. It can help parents to understand and optimise a baby’s schedule, with sleeping and feeding patterns the most obvious benefit. More seriously, and perhaps more importantly, data collection makes it much easier to identify emerging health problems if they occur. This tweet from paediatrician Natasha Burgert says it all:
Intriguingly, though, the apps and smart products provide little or no analysis. Why track sleep throughout the day if you can’t garner information on average sleep patterns that month? If your baby is crying at 4 a.m., why? What does he or she usually do at 4 a.m.? London-based Peekaboo Labs was formed to address this gap. A new company that uses data emailed from parents using the Baby Connect app, Peekaboo look for patterns, correlations and causation in the data to turn it into actionable knowledge, delivering a detailed report to parents about their babies. The aim is to help parents have happier, healthier babies.
There is an argument that too much technology may train parents to ignore their intuition and not learn to care for their baby the “natural” way. And in some cases monitoring may even increase parental anxiety. The chance of the machine breaking or sounding the alarm on a false positive, plus the possibility that constant monitoring simply decreases the amount of time exhausted parents of newborns can spend relaxing, are all significant disadvantages. One parent told Peekaboo Labs that they didn’t want their baby “looked after like a lab rat”. On the other hand, many bewildered new parents are happy to have a bit of insight into the mysterious creatures that are babies. For them, bring on the quantified baby.
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