How to (and Why to) Connect Your Baby to the Internet of Things

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What’s the Latest?

Similar to fitness trackers adults wear to measure exercise metrics like heart rate, calories burned, and so on, a new soft anklet designed for baby could help take a load off parents’ minds. Designed by the company Sproutling and meant to be worn during nap time or at night, the activity tracker measures heart rate, temperature, mood, whether baby is still sleeping, and if he or she has rolled over onto its stomach. The tracker is linked with a mobile app that can keep parents up to date with a simple visual description of how baby is getting on with the baby sitter (probably just fine, so go on and enjoy the evening).

What’s the Big Idea?

Sproutling has made an effort to make the data output of the device user friendly. Rather than receive lots of numerical data points that require mathematics and knowledge of past patterns to interpret, the anklet sends a visual image, showing baby’s heartbeat and using simple indicators such as “awake” and “asleep”. The company hopes to harness the power of data aggregation for its future research and development plans (if you would be so kind):

Sproutling is also hoping that its parent customers will want to anonymously share their data, not only to help train and improve the data models, but also because the company…has pilots planned with a major hospital and university that will yield more than 2,000 hours of testing by the time the tracker ships in March 2015.