Monbaby

Monbaby is a baby health monitor, a real-time wireless sensor designed specifically for babies and their parents. It keeps track of the baby’s vital signals and issues alerts upon critical events. Think of it as an onStar system for your baby.

Our product aim is to reduce parents anxiety about their babies and especially, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, SIDS, and to help parents to monitor their babies’ health with least amount of effort.

We are developing a wireless Bluetooth based monitor wearable as an ankle bracelet. It would measure baby infant orientation, movements and ambient temperature. Measurements are transmitted wirelessly to a Bluetooth capable device, such as IPhone or Android smartphone or a Bluetooth compatible baby monitor base.

The video of an accelerometer prototype could be found here:

and of heart rate prototype here:

Smartphone apps are also developed that re-transmit data to a cloud, so that parents and doctors could view the historical data on the web. The collected  data may be analysed to find irregularities and patterns and may help doctors with understanding of what causes SIDS. We see it as a step toward defeating this dangerous condition.

Unlike existing products on the market that send alerts when baby stops moving, at which point it maybe too late to react, Monbaby warns parents if baby turned around and sleeping on stomach, giving parents plenty of time to go and turn baby face up, as sleeping on stomach has risks associated with SIDS.

Parents will be able to customize alerts, for example not to receive alerts when baby has turned face down, or to receive alerts when baby is asleep for too long or if room temperature is too high or too cold.

People wear jewelry, rings, bracelets. In the future, we see all the jewelry will perform function of health monitoring. We envision Monbaby as a first step in this direction and a step toward an on-going proactive diagnosis.

Now, there is finally a way to have peace of mind to make sure your baby is in good condition all the time! No more waking up multiple times in the middle of the night to check on your baby.

What can Monbaby measure?

  • Heart rate
  • Body temperature
  • Freefall
  • Shaking
  • Movement

Who should use Monbaby?

  • Any household who has babies or young children
  • Newborn babies in hospital nursery room
  • Young children in hospital pediatric department
  • Elderly in the elderly caring facilities
  • Folks who need active external care

What devices can be used to receive Monbaby?

Monbaby was designed with adopted health care profiles of Bluetooth 4.0 (Smart), therefore any Bluetooth LE compatible devices can be used as the data receiver.  For example, IPhone, Android phones, PC with a BLE dongle, a monitoring watch could receive BLE signals.

The following diagram depicts possible data flow:

What are the other potential usages?

  • Vital signals tracking logs
    • Collected data can be stored on the receiver device for a set amount of time. 
    • When pediatrician asks for the fever information, simply pull out the history log in a second of effort.
  • Cloud access for the health data
    • Check your baby condition any time anywhere.
  • Data analysis for research purpose
    • With a big users base, all the health data can be collected anonymously for research purpose. 
    • Health experts can now have some solid real-life data to base on for their research.

Any concerns about using Monbaby?

  • Radio Frequency (RF) emission
    • Monbaby uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for its wireless data transmission.
    • Compared to a lot of existing baby monitoring products currently sold in the market, BLE incurs only a small fraction of RF emission.
    • Wireless transmissions can also be minimized by configuring the device to send data only on critical events.
  • Battery
    • Monbaby operates on a CR2032 3V battery.