There’s no doubt that baby monitors are indispensable, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for improvement, as far as they’re concerned. Touted as “the world’s smartest monitor,” Sproutling comes in the form of a wearable that syncs to a smartphone app, something unheard of in this field until now.
Parents should be aware if their baby wakes up crying at night, but conventional baby monitors look so ancient, it’s no wonder that someone wanted to improve them. Sproutling is a crowdfunded baby monitor that makes quite a few changes to the conventional ones. First of all, it’s a wearable, which might not seem like a great idea at first, as parents might suspect it bothers the baby. Still, the baby will barely feel it, and since it’s supposed to be placed around a leg, he won’t be able to remove it, either.
Secondly, Sproutling is able to learn and predict the baby’s sleep pattern, and will provide more details than a baby monitor ever could. Some of the aspects that are recorded by this gadget include the baby’s heart rate, his position during sleep, the estimated wake-up time, as well as several environmental factors such as light, temperature and noise.
Sproutling co-founder Chris Bruce is quite confident about the potential of wearable baby monitors: “Parents have been relying on baby monitors for over 75 years and in that time, they fundamentally haven’t changed at all. They continue to be a poor extension of parents’ eyes and ears and require constant attention to see if your baby is moving or making noise. As parents ourselves, we wanted something that could tell us how our baby was doing when they weren’t moving or making noise and when we were unable to pay full attention, like when showering or sleeping. We created the Sproutling Baby Monitor to be smarter and help parents be more effective–and we really hope our product will instill confidence in parents so they can grow happy families.”
The Sproutling Baby Monitor is not without downsides, though. Since it’s paired to a smartphone app, I can’t help but wonder what happens if the phone’s battery runs out, or if it’s muted. In the latter scenario, it would be better if the app would be able to bypass the phone’s current profiles, so that parents get notifications from the baby monitor no matter what.
The wearable baby monitor is available for pre-order on the manufacturer’s website for $249, and assuming that $50K worth of pre-orders are placed, the gadget should be shipped in March 2015.
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