This is great and all, but it has to be 100% utterly completely reliable with no false-negatives. If it doesn't tell you (i.e. false negative) even once , then you can guarantee that it will never be trusted ever again, especially by the birth parent. We've gone through a range of frankly awful monitors and cameras that simply were not reliable. E.g. cameras that would regularly go offline for maintenance between 3am…
Did you know that billions of babies were reared before video monitors were even invented?
I don't have a baby, but I might have the need for a baby monitor. A sick family member who needs help sometimes in the middle of the night. Training TensorFlow to hear her yell "Help!" isn't going to do the job. For now, she reaches over to her phone, presses the home button, and says "Hey Google, call $familymember". It works, unless she can't reach her phone for any reason. I had looked at this article wondering t…
Why don't you put a shortcut the home screen to call you directly?
It's a good idea. The main problem however is touch. That's why we went to voice activation. If she could unlock it, she could call and wouldn't need voice activation.
I don't get it. We bought a baby monitor in 2012 that was probably $80 (Philips brand I think). It was based off the DECT standard that was developed for wireless landline phones, so range was around 1200ft line-of-sight, in practice you could go two stories down in our apartment building to visit friends and it would stay connected just fine. The baby unit was quite bulky and ran off wall power, but the parent unit…
In our case we have a non verbal autistic son and a video baby monitor is really useful since it's not like he can call out for us or tell us if he has a problem. I am busy replacing his with a raspberry pi based ones because I've had enough trouble with Nest having too much control over the device and changing the functionality without warning.
An old Android tablet or phone with the app Dormi does great, too. The best part is that it doesn't make any noise until there's sustained noise detected in the baby room. It also alerts if it loses connectivity and can be snoozed at 10 minute intervals.
Harder still is getting it past the spouse regulatory approval process.
My wife has been pretty accommodating for any nerdery I want to engage in for taking care of the kids. The only project she really put her foot down on (and probably correctly so) was about building a crib myself. She figured there were a lot of safety standards about materials, size, bar spacing, etc. that were best left to the professionals.
My wife built a beautiful wooden crib (despite no previous experience with finer carpentry, mortise and tenon joinery, etc.) and it's worked out wonderfully. I think she based it off of this: https://mattcremona.com/uncategorized/walnut-and-maple-crib
Where my partner usually steps in is not safety, but time. It is great if you're able to build some things yourself. But the kid and in particular your partner need your hands on deck, not on the workbench for days on, just to end up with an unfinished crib. And there are so many other, more important things to do that cannot be outsourced that easily. And once the first kid is in the house, expect interruptions. Oh,…
If you are building the crib after the baby is born, you are doing it wrong.
I generally agree, but only because there’s no time for a big project like that with an infant around
But not everyone uses a crib right away — we do a combination of bassinet and co-sleeping with our ~4mo. Probably time to still build that crib if woodworking is your down time
Edit: though my wife would never have gone for an idea like that, she got the nesting bug pretty hard
Please, please, do not use something like this as the only method of monitoring a child’s safety. This sort of thing has given me honest to god nightmares. My day job is managing development and infrastructure of internet connected cameras, with motion detection, notifications, and all the rest of it. Every now and again someone new will start on the marketing team and put together something about using them as baby…
So what you're saying is, to save a baby we gotta hurt a baby
I know this was intended to be a joke, but it didn't really land with me.
Please, please, do not use something like this as the only method of monitoring a child’s safety. This sort of thing has given me honest to god nightmares. My day job is managing development and infrastructure of internet connected cameras, with motion detection, notifications, and all the rest of it. Every now and again someone new will start on the marketing team and put together something about using them as baby…
A baby monitor is to detect if a baby is crying not if a baby is dying. It seems like your exaggerating the user need (system engineer in HW+ SW and father of 3 here). Most use cases for baby monitors are “im relatively nearby, but want to hear if the kiddo’s waking up”. This solution is great.
True. As my coworker, who has 3 kids of her own, always says, if they're going to stop breathing, its not like its something youre going to hear. They could be in a crib in your bedroom at night, and you'd never know. The monitor is just to see whats going on, are they even sleeping yet, who threw their stuffed animal out, etc...
So, don't get me wrong. This is a fun project and a neat little device. I don't mean to take away from it in any way. However it is really important to consider why baby monitors are so primitive: because the cost of a false negative is huge. I didn't see any mention of this in the author's experiments (only a '>98% accuracy' note). So let's talk about this a little bit: is "accuracy" what we want? Probably not---I d…
> (only a '>98% accuracy' note). So let's talk about this a little bit: is "accuracy" what we want? Probably not---I don't care if I get accidentally notified, but I care very much if I don't get notified when the baby is crying Presumably this is 98% accuracy per sample or something, not per session of crying. I wouldn't want to leave my kid completely unanswered 1/50th of the time if he actually needed me, but I th…
> the real downside of this model: it overfits on regular crying
I'm with you there, that's a big downside too, but that's not the "real" downside---there are like seven different downsides present with the data science going on here and it's hard for me to say which is the biggest issue, because they're all issues. Data science is not trivial!
This is great and all, but it has to be 100% utterly completely reliable with no false-negatives. If it doesn't tell you (i.e. false negative) even once , then you can guarantee that it will never be trusted ever again, especially by the birth parent. We've gone through a range of frankly awful monitors and cameras that simply were not reliable. E.g. cameras that would regularly go offline for maintenance between 3am…
The V3 Owlet has magnetic charging instead of the port, which will hopefully be more durable.