gadgets can help monitor baby's sleep
For years, parents have spied on their sleeping infants with grainy video images from baby monitors.
Now a new generation of wearable devices promises to track your newborn's sleeping habits, gathering data like whether babies are on their backs or stomachs, their breathing rates and even, in some cases, blood-oxygen levels and heart rates.
It's an interesting concept, though it's not entirely clear what a parent who isn't a doctor would do with all that information.
But there's a more immediate issue to be resolved: These first-generation devices simply don't work very well.
One example is the Mimo, a sleep-tracking device that connects to a customized bodysuit that a baby wears while sleeping. A Mimo kit costs $200 and includes three "kimonos," or button-up bodysuits.
Mimo's technology includes a low-power Bluetooth wireless base station that must be plugged in inside the baby's room, and a small plastic device (the "turtle") that magnetically attaches to a sleeping baby's clothing.
The turtle tracks the infant's skin temperature, breathing, sleep position, movement and whether the baby is awake or asleep. But it also presents immediate impracticalities for new parents.
First, the baby has to be dressed in one of the little kimonos for any nap or nighttime sleep you want to track. And in a test, the monitoring was interesting but inconsistent.
