Oh, baby — the Internet of Toddlers to the rescue!
By: Binny Vyas
Tags: Smart Baby Devices, IoT, Baby Care, Mobile App Development, Baby Products

A modern-day infant care nursery may include a cuddly teddy bear, a soft duvet, BPA-free milk bottles and eco-friendly diapers. Apart from those essentials, as a parent, did you remember to include IoT-enabled baby products to this list? As exciting as that may sound, the IoT-minded entrepreneurs have found need-based growth potential in the baby care and parenting markets. The baby care marketplace is booming with new opportunities as many enterprises are gearing to make parenting easier than before with the help of IoT technology. In this blog post, we will introduce you to several innovative use cases of IoT for baby care that will add safety and convenience for nursing and parenting.

“The baby-monitoring market is set to be worth $1.63B by 2025.” — Hexa Research

What is the Internet of Toddlers?

Often parents struggle or fail to identify their babies’ needs as babies are not capable of expressing their desires and concerns. All they know at their age is that when they cry, someone is there and the majority of the time when someone shows up, their needs are met. Hence, known trauma associated with newborn infant care has caused newlywed couples to delay or put off starting a family. Thanks to the advancements in IoT technologies, we can reduce the stress and ease the burden of child care.

Introducing the ‘Internet of Toddlers’, a newly coined term that promises IoT-based solutions that keep babies safe and put parents and childcare providers at ease. It involves the use of smart devices, wearables, and child monitoring mobile applications that are capable of accurately capturing real-time information (data) about the baby, enabling parents to conveniently nurse and monitor infants and toddlers throughout the day.

Here are some amazing baby care-centric use cases:

1. Smart cozy crib

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 3,500 babies in the United States die suddenly and unexpectedly each year from accidental suffocation, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), or similar causes. Sleep-related infant deaths can be significantly reduced with a responsive smart crib integrated with IoT technology.

A smart crib allows babies to get comfortable sleep using relaxing rhythms while safely swaddling them — it prevents them from rolling over into uncomfortable positions during sleep. Unlike a traditional flat crib, a smart crib uses sleep trackers and connects to a child-monitoring mobile application, allowing parents to stay connected to their baby remotely. The app provides a record of your baby’s sleeping habits while using artificial intelligence to recommend an optimal sleeping schedule. Additionally, the smart app can send alerts to parents when the baby awakens.

The goal of the smart crib is to help the baby get comfortable and healthy sleep. A smart crib is among the new innovative products that use IoT technology — improving parent-baby relationships while ensuring healthier sleeping habits for both.

2. Smart vital tracker

A new mother’s biggest concern: ‘Is my baby breathing?’ Acutely, every parent has probably asked this question while gazing at their newborn baby. With IoT, it is now possible to monitor a baby’s respiration, skin temperature, body position, sleeping habits, and activity levels through harmless sensor-based technologies that can be easily pinned to the baby’s clothing. Data collected from smart sensors is effortlessly transmitted and analyzed in real-time. The baby’s vitals are interpreted, with AI-based analytics, and available via an integrated mobile app. Parents and caregivers can view, monitor and receive mobile alerts from the application if vitals fall outside preset levels.

Additionally, historical data is archived so that parents can review critical data such as: ‘how many hours the baby is sleeping.’ A smart vital tracker provides peace of mind to parents — enabling them to keep track of their baby remotely — important on those rare evenings when both parents can enjoy time away from the child.

3. Smart location tracker

Toddlers, also known as curtain crawlers, love to explore and often crawl anywhere and everywhere in the home, but unexpected issues can occur when they choose to hide/play in unsafe locations. Worry not! Like multinational enterprises that track high-value assets using IoT, your child in your home is your high-value asset and a smart tracker can be as valuable to you as it is too big businesses! Proximity sensors for toddlers come to the rescue. It is a smart tracker that provides parents with the ability to track their child’s location and notify them when the child wanders away — outside the safety zone.

With a smart location tracker and mobile app, a parent can set distance limitations and trigger alarms when predefined zones are breached. Interestingly, the tracker can also be integrated with a smartphone triggerable buzzer alarm to ensure that the toddler does not get misplaced.

Final thoughts

Nearly everything around us is getting connected to the Internet, including the thriving baby care market with new and innovative IoT-powered products. If you’ve read this blog to this point, you must be looking at the “Internet of Toddlers” from a parent’s point of view, or as an entrepreneur. If you are contemplating the baby care market, this may be the right time for your enterprises to build and deploy value-added products that can enrich modern-day parenting. If you are taking ‘baby steps’ towards developing an IoT baby care solution, then please reach out to our experts and leverage our wide-range of IoT solutions that are designed to help enterprises to increase time to market and achieve a superior ROI.