Monbaby – Backerjack

Having a child is a life-altering event, full of contradictions. The intense joy and excitement one feels at the child’s birth quickly becomes inundated with the worry that comes along with taking care of that new life. Is the baby sleeping ok? Throwing up? Crying? Breathing alright? And on and on — all parents would attest that it can quickly become exhausting to worry so much.

The creators behind the Monbaby know exactly what this mess of emotions feels like as they’ve had the experience themselves, which led them to create their their version of the baby monitor. Shaped like a small button, the Monbaby clips on to any article of clothing and sends a variety of information every five seconds to your smartphone, including a baby’s breathing, sleeping patterns, and the position the baby is in while it sleeps. This vigilance is a extraordinary relief to parents especially because customizable alerts are available through the iOS or Android app, lifting all sorts of worry from their shoulders so they can more easily relax.

Monbaby’s applications are not only limited to babies: the company sees their device working for toddlers and even the elderly as well. That said, while it uses Bluetooth Low Energy to facilitate these features, it stands to reason many parents wouldn’t want a wireless device so intimately close to their newborn child. Ultimately, though, this may be a case where peace of mind ultimately trumps fear. The Monbaby baby monitor is going for $109 with an estimated delivery date of December 2014. The company has already achieved their funding goal of $15,000.

Monbaby is a wireless window into your wee one’s world

The Premise. Baby monitors haven’t changed much for decades, partially because they haven’t had to serve any other purposes. But what if a baby monitor could report on a child’s sleeping patterns and whether or not they were safe in their crib?

The Product. The Monbaby sleep analyzer is a small button that can be clipped onto any article of clothing and monitors how much a child is moving during sleep, whether or not they have woken up, and even if they’ve fallen. This data is sent to the companion iPhone app, which reports all of this information as well as whether a child has rolled onto their stomach or back, and can provide customizable alerts depending on certain variables. It can provide this data for users of any age, but in the early stages of the technology, it is being tailored specifically for newborn children.

The Pitch. Monbaby inventor Arturas Vaitaitis shares his inspiration behind the sleep analyzer and discusses his professional background, also asking for feedback on what else this tiny device could do. While every child will react differently, the baby in the video seems content enough, not even noticing the Monbaby clipped onto its clothes. The device has been featured at CES, the IWC Bluetooth competition, and won a prize at the Munich Wearable Technologies conference. Vaitaitis is looking for $10,000 to create an infrastructure that can store the data recorded by the sleep analyzer.

The Perks. Getting a Monbaby sleep analyzer button with the companion app takes a pledge of $79. Custom colored models are available in blue, pink, gray, and red for $169. The basic model will ship in October with the colored buttons arriving the following month.

The Potential. There’s a lot of untapped potential in the baby monitor market, and something like this could also provide valuable data for doctors to look at when considering a child’s development. Not only is it safe and non-intrusive for sleeping babies, but having one of these could even help parents get a little extra sleep themselves, and that alone would probably be reason enough to pick one up.