Based out of the New York area, Mondevices Inc. has created the baby sleep monitor that fits in a button, creating the first “smart button” wearable technology. This year the “smart button” has won a prize in Smart Clothing category at the Wearable Technologies conference in Munich.
This product was also a finalist in the IWC Bluetooth competition in 2012 and was invited to a Freescale booth in CES 2012 in Las Vegas.
Monbaby is an award-winning technology that transmits a visual log of a newborn child's breathing motions to parent's smartphone or any other Bluetooth-capable device to ensure peace of mind and sound sleep for all. It can be attached to any article of baby's clothing. The story of Monbaby began when Arturas Vaitaitis, the founder of Mondevices, had his first son 8 years ago.
“As a new parent I could not sleep, worrying that something was wrong if everything was quiet. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, worried about SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), and would go up to my son and check that he was sleeping fine, occasionally waking him up in the process. I wished such a product was on a market back then.” For the past two years, the Mondevices team has worked on this product.
Now Monbaby is a fully functional prototype in its 5th iteration, almost ready for manufacturing at a local facility in NJ. The product is expected to begin shipping in October this year.
First of a kind
When the Mondevices team began working down this path in 2011, there was no competition, and the team was quick to recognize the potential of the product and the impact it could have on parents and newborns.
Now there is a crop of startups that alleviate anxiety of new parents, but Mondevices believes that the Monbaby product is superior, not least because of its universal attachment form factor.
The Monbaby monitor looks like a button: a smart button that snaps on anywhere to clothing. This universal enclosure feature makes this technology applicable to all ages. It attaches just as easily to elderly parents’ pajamas as to a child's onesie. Even though this technology can be applied universally, Mondevices developed its first product, Monbaby, for the parents of newborns and young children.
Small kids cannot complain about their sleep before they learn how to speak. Thus the Monbaby monitor measures child’s breathing, activity, and movements and then transmits the data to a smartphone. Parents will be able to configure real-time alerts on their smartphone for conditions that concern them. Alerts and information about their child’s sleep will arrive in the framework of push notifications, allowing parents to sleep with peace of mind.
Product Features
Monbaby measures movements caused by child’s breathing and sends data to a smartphone over Bluetooth Low Energy or to any Bluetooth-capable device. Monbaby uses an accelerometer-based sensor that detects and measures the slightest motion.
Measurements are done in real-time, 5 times per second, and transmitted over Bluetooth (4.0) Low Energy to a smartphone app (iPhone), which displays information about in a convenient, easy-to-understand manner. The sensor is powered by 3V coin-cell battery which can handle 5 weeks of constant use and 1 year if in passive mode. The antenna range of 200 ft. easily covers a large house.
Additional features include position measurements, orientation, and activity levels. Monbaby detects abrupt turns and falls, which is handy when a growing child begins getting out of the crib! The Monbaby technology will continue to grow and evolve with a child.
Orientation – In 1994, the “Back to Sleep” campaign began in earnest with the goal of educating parents and caregivers about ways to reduce the risk of SIDS. One of the risk factors was infants sleeping on their stomachs. The campaign managed to reduce mortality rates from SIDS by 100%. One of Monbaby’s features is an orientation alert that will notify parents if their child has rolled over and is sleeping face down.
Activity Level – The Monbaby monitor is armed with a powerful 14bit accelerometer that measures child’s activity levels during sleep. The Monbaby iPhone application sends the data to a computer in the cloud, where the data undergoes a much more thorough analysis. Results of the analysis will help parents monitor the quality of their child’s sleep.
The real power of this product is the internal algorithms that crunch raw data and turn it into a dashboard of health risk factors, visual event logs, and real-time alarms about baby roll-overs, sleeping position, breathing frequency, excessive fussing, sleeping patterns, and other information. The software will help parents analyze and optimize their child’s sleep and detect best sleeping conditions.
About Mondevices
Mondevices is a consumer technology company founded in 2013. Mondevices’ mission is to improve quality of life with wearable technologies and data-processing algorithms.
