MonBaby is a baby monitor that connects to parent's smartphones. Our goal is to end sleep-time infant deaths and improve sleep for all.
Read more
73
backers
$4,672
Replay with sound
MonBaby is a baby monitor that connects to parent's smartphones. Our goal is to end sleep-time infant deaths and improve sleep for all.
About this project
Our Dream
Our dream is the future, where our clothing will be "smart", filled with tiny sensors and will monitor our bodies, not unlike sensors in modern cars.
Our first step is a smart button and our first project is to fit a baby monitor in a button :)
Monbaby is an award winning sleep monitor that looks like a button. It can be attached to any article of clothing.
It snaps on just as easily to your father’s favorite pajamas as to your newborn's onesies and applicable to all ages.
However, we decided to implement this technology for parents of newborns first.
Monbaby sends baby's breathing movements to your smartphone.
Using this product you will satisfy your curiosity about your children's sleeping patterns and habits. Your phone screen shows in real time how they are sleeping right now. Each morning you will see if they slept well through the night, or if they tossed and fussed more than usual. You can use this product to analyze sleep patterns of your kids and get recommendations on how to improve their sleep.
Parents can activate alerts on conditions they are particularly concerned about.
Our story
The story of Monbaby started when I had my first son. I remember that I could not sleep worrying how he slept through the night, if he fussed more than usual or slept fine. Back then I could only wish there was a sleep analyzer product and app on the market.
For the past two years my team and I worked on this product. Finally, Monbaby is a fully functional prototype in its 5th iteration, almost ready for manufacturing at a local facility in NJ. We hope with your help this product will become reality.
Our "smart button" product recently won a prize in the Wearable Technologies conference in Munich this year, in Clothing category.
This product also was a finalist in the IWC Bluetooth competition in 2012 and was invited to a Freescale booth in CES 2012 in Las Vegas.
How it works
On a technical side, it is a wearable accelerometer based sensor that measures motion and movements or lack thereof, along with position, orientation, activity levels all while detecting breathing and falls.
Measurements are done in real-time, 5 times per second and transmitted over Bluetooth (4.0) Low Energy to a smartphone app (iPhone), which displays information about in a convenient, easy-to-understand manner. The sensor is powered by 3V coin-cell battery giving 5 weeks of constant use and 1 year in passive mode. The antenna range of 200 ft easily covers a large house.
A smartphone re-transmits signals over WIFI/CELL to a computer in the cloud, where data is stored in a database and can be shared with others over a web-page. A much more sophisticated analysis is applied in the backend.
I am certain that same quantitative methods that work so well in the finance industry can and should be applied to sleep analysis. Our team combined more than 20 years of experience of working on cutting edge IT tech gives us a unique perspective and an analytical edge.
With this funding, here's what we will do
The data we collect with this technology are used in a context of sleep analysis and sleep monitoring of your children. This product is the first and the most important step in this path. We have a lot of plans for this technology and we want to ask for your feedback. What are other potential benefits of having the data about your sleep at your fingertips.
We are also working on a backend technology that will store data collected by those devices. If we raise enough money, we will be able to store this data for you. You will be able to share the sleeping logs with your friends, family or an expert of your choice.
In our day and age, our cars contain a great many sensors that constantly monitor car's status and performance, whereas our bodies lack these mechanisms. We dream that in the future it will change and change fast. Many wearable sensors in our clothing will aggregate data into a personal dashboard.
This campaign will take us a step closer towards future real-time, ongoing aggregation of data about our bodies and turning it into useful knowledge and information!
Risks and challenges
We have few major milestones, passing of which constitutes the risks and challenges of this project.
First, we need to pass FCC certification, this should take 3-5 weeks. We already identified a local lab that would do testing and certification.
Second is a manufacturing stage. We have already established partnership with a local manufacturing facility in NJ and have already run through few prototype boards. Our product is a 5th iteration.
In parallel we will polish up our Monbaby iPhone app.
EDITED...
During the campaign we've got a lot of requests to add support for Android application. We've heard you and will start development of a version for Android in parallel with completing an iPhone app.
Here is what the project will do with the collected funds:
Your contributions will go to payments for manufacturing of injection molding for internal enclosure and clothing snap enclosure.
You contributions will go to payments for wireless certification with FCC.
You contributions will also go to manufacturing of the devices itself.
You contributions will also go into polishing up an iPhone application and development of a version for Android.
If for any reason, we collect more funds than we expected, we will use it for the following goals.
If we collect more than $100,000, we will use the money to develop a wireless base, which would replace smartphone. It will re-transmit collected data to a computer in a cloud. This is essential for our next product, for monitoring of your elderly parents who don't usually own smartphones. We will also develop a database where this data could be stored and you will be able to share it with your family, friends or an expert of your choice.
Milestones and the timeline.
Manufacturing:
1. 1 week: prepare design files and order round design
2. 3 weeks: complete design and get a prototype
3. 1 week: submit a new design for FCC testing to MET lab
4. 3 weeks: get testing results back
5. 1 week: update the timeline, if testing results are negative go step 3 and repeat, this will add 1 month to the timeline. If results are positive prepare CAD files for manufacturing facility in NJ (PNC)
6. 6 weeks: manufacture first batch. In parallel order packaging materials
7. 2 weeks: package and ship products to early bird backers
8. 4 months: package and ship products to the rest of backers
App development:
1. 2 weeks: UX design
2. 4 weeks: polish and complete iPhone app. In parallel we will start development of an app version for Android.
3. 2 weeks: submit iPhone app to app store and wait for approval
4. 1 week: if app store approved the app, send out the update, if not go to step 3. This will add 3 weeks to the project timeline.
5. 6 weeks: start working on a premium features, if there is enough additional funding collected.
FAQ
-
Yes, we will. Please add $15 to the reward for shipping to Canada.
-
No audio for this version, we decided to start with Minimum Value Product and add features and functionality later.
-
a) The material we use is ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), which is used for toys production, including Lego bricks.
b) It is not a medical device, and will not require FDA certification.
c) The overall profile dimensions of the enclosure are 1.27"x1.55". The 1.27" dimension completely prevents the product from fitting into the choke test tube. See
http://www.perfectlysafe.com/choketester.html.Regarding radiation concerns, there is a blog on our website: http://mondevices.com/2011/12/26/radiation-concern/
"Radiation of radio frequency (RF) devices are measured by Special absorption rate (SAR). It is defined as the power absorbed per mass of tissue and has units of watts per kilogram (W/kg). A general rule of thumb is, higher emission power would increase the SAR measurement.
Cellphones in US are limited to 1.6W/kg by regulation
Apple iPhone 4 : 1.17W/kg
Baby monitors range between 0.01-0.08W/kg
Bluetooth devices about 0.001W/kg
There is no public measurement data found for BLE yet, but given BLE has even lower power emission than Bluetooth, the SAR number should be very insignificant to be compared."
As you can see BLE device is 10-80 times less radiation than baby monitor.It's also cordless, which eliminates all sorts of dangers with cords.
Support this project
Funding period
- (50 days)