Rigging Up Baby 117
theodp writes "Over at Fast Company, Rebecca Greenfield explores the rise of extreme baby monitoring. 'In the imminent future,' writes Greenfield, 'any curious parent with an iPhone will have access to helpful analytics, thanks to the rise of wearable gadgets for babies. Following the success of self-trackers for grown-ups, like Jawbone and Fitbit, companies like Sproutling, Owlet, and Mimo want to quantify your infants.' Devices connect to a baby via boot, anklet, or onesie, and record heart rate, breathing patterns, temperature, body position, and the ambient conditions of the room. While the breathing and sleeping alerts will calm a lot of parents, Greenfield reports the real holy grail is the data garnered from tracking, which some companies plan to share with researchers.
'We're creating the largest data set of infant health data,' says Owlet co-founder Jordan Monroe."
Re:What's wrong with gathering data? (Score:5, Interesting)
For every child that has been 'saved' by having a monitor go off when the child stopped breathing, thousands of parents have had the shit scared out of them for no reason whatsoever, have run the perfectly normal child to the ER (risking a serious automobile accident) or have simply been worn down staring at the display. And these are with kids who have some significant risk of apnea in the first place.
Placing these things in the general pediatric population is going to be fun. And the data will be so heterogeneous that it will be useless scientifically.
It's just a money grab, as usual.
Helicopter parents ftw! (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh how did we ever survive without constantly knowing our kids' whereabouts? Do you remember the times? When we were scared shitless because little Timmy could not be tracked down via GPS? When kids actually could have secrets from their parents? Nothing spells "I love you, dear child" like calling when he's making out with his first love.
But I see the upside of it. Kids that are constantly monitored, prodded and nagged by parents will more likely develop a heavy resentment for total surveillance, and they will early in their life start to develop counter strategies.
What am I missing here? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Final Cut's Zoe Implant (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition,"The Final Cut" is a gem of a Robin Williams movie on this subject many may not have seen-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_(2004_film) [wikipedia.org] (below is wikipedia summary)
The Final Cut is a 2004 film written and directed by Omar Naim. It stars Robin Williams ... ... The story takes place in a near future in which people can pay to have their babies implanted with memory chips. These "Zoe Implants", developed by EYE Tech company, record every moment of their lives, so that they may be viewed by loved ones after one's death. The plot centers on Alan Hakman, a "cutter", whose job it is to edit the Zoe footage into a feature-film length piece, called a "Rememory".
The Final Cut is about subjectivity, memory and history; posing the question, "If history is what is written and remembered, then what happens when memories are edited and rewritten?"
The film won the award for best screenplay at the Deauville Film Festival and was nominated for best film at the Catalonian International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival.
Wow! I am not alone! (Score:2, Interesting)
Since our child was about 18 months old I have had extensive video monitor + computer analysis of her sleep. It was amazing.
Surprising things we have learned.
- Not uncommon for a child to be awake for 1 hour on some nights. (Happily stays in crib, just moves / looks around)
- Ideal bedtime has been between 5:30 - 6:30, any later and quality and length of nighttime sleep is greatly diminished. (Norm sleep is 11+ hours of sleep minus breaks)
The hardest thing about this tech is letting go, it's easy to get dependent on the data.