New wave baby monitors track your infant’s vital signs, but do they actually quell parents’ fears?

Until recently, the biggest change in baby monitoring technology was going from the walkie-talkie-like audio monitor to a video screen monitor. But now, with the popularity of the Fitbit, and the quantified self movement that has people hungry to track their own personal data, there is a different kind of baby monitor.

Mattel just bought the San Francisco startup Sproutling, an ankle bracelet a baby wears that measures heart rate, skin temperature, room temperature, motion, sleep patterns. It even claims to be able to tell you your baby’s mood when they wake up. Then there’s Mimo, a baby monitor embedded into a onesie, that provides breathing, temperature and sleep data information. Both of these products can send alerts to your phone.

“We’re seeing these devises pop up in and around the market. But my concern is that they’re entering the market out of the place of fear,” says Dr Wendy Sue Swanson, pediatrician and executive director of digital health at Seattle Childrens. “We’re seeing the promise that they might simplify or cleanup parenthood in a way. Parenthood is an overwhelming time for every parent. It’s really scary to be a parent. The number one thing parents worry about, particularly if they have a very well and healthy baby, is the threat of something they can’t control.”

Dr Swanson says tracking a baby doesn’t work great for certain personality types.

“I think we have to acknowledge that this might amp and rev up anxiety more than it will decrease it in some parents. If you’re one of those parents that’s using this device and it actually seems to make you a little bit more anxious and it alarms four times at night and you’re out of bed and nothing is different the next day. I don’t know, maybe we do turn it off and see how can we do a week without the tracker versus with the tracker. We know people are getting addicted to their phones, we know people get addicted to data, we know it can provide illusions, so kind of keep that in check.”

She says the current tracking and monitering technology is still not intelligent enough to to replace a parents intuition.

“Parents learn how their babies sleep, parents learn how their babies cry, how they wake up and how they respond. And we’re in the infancy of these trackers. I don’t think we have a lot of guarantee that they make it better. I think our experience of using home respiratory and cadiorespiratory monitors in parents, we know that they raise a lot of anxiety and they don’t decrease risk for SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). The storytellers at the front of these products talk about worry, talk about preventing SIDS and then they know they can’t make a claim that their devices prevent it. But they give the illusion that they do. So I think it’s fine that parents use these devices if they can keep at arms reach what the promise is. It’s a gadget, it might be fun, but it’s not going to replace the nuance and wisdom and insight that comes from watching your baby, raising your baby, feeding your baby. That we can do that without necessarily depicting it with all this quantified data and numeric information.”

Dr Swanson does think the technology could get there eventually. She imagines a sort of AI device could give basic medical advice to nervous parents who want to rush their kid to the doctor every time they cough.

There are also a couple of products on the market right now that she’s impressed with.

“There’s a device called Lully [Sleep Guardian] that I like that’s trying to determine if they can intervene in night terrors. Lully actually goes under the baby’s mattress, learns when those night terrors happen and then buzzes the bed, wakes up the child gently and hopefully aborts that process. Kid doesn’t have a night terror, parent gets to sleep through the night.”

I asked Dr Swanson if there was a parenting app that she would find useful.

“I think we live in a time where parents are overly critical of themselves and of their parenting. I think it’s making it harder to enjoy this experience that typically goes really well. So I think if we could have an app that was like an attagirl or an attaboy everyday, like, you did it okay!  It wasn’t perfect, you didn’t get the peas in at lunch, but your kid had some vegetables yesterday. And you did a great job buckling the car seat properly. If we could help provide feedback on all the things we’re doing so well, so that we weren’t keeping such bad records on ourselves as parents. I think that would go a long way.”

Read more from Dr Swanson on her popular parenting blog.

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