The Quantified Baby

Quantified Self QS Open Forum
1

Going beyond quantified self, is anyone quantifying their babies/kids extensively? I’m noticing some baby monitors with logging capabilities and web platforms dedicated to tracking baby stats. What are some tools out there that people are actually using and what are the parameters people are tracking?

2

Some of the things I’ve seen:

  • SensibleBaby is launching a motion/temperature sensor tied to an iPhone app (and the cloud) this summer (they were a finalist in this year’s Harvard Business School startup competition).
  • Sproutling is apparently doing something similar (Interview on GigaOM )
  • Rest Devices is working on monitoring generally, with babies being one of their directions. They’ve been around for a while but haven’t launched yet
  • Exmobaby is doing something around a baby’s “mood”, tracking ECG, skin temperature and movement.

I think a lot of people are enthusiastic about quantifying your baby, but lots of folks in the baby industry (nurses, midwives, etc.) think it’s horrible. I predict some blowback as this thing gets into the mainstream.

3

I was talking to a pediatrician who said that if babies taste a food 6-10 times before they start to walk, then they’ll develop a lasting taste for that food, but that once they start to walk, they distrust any new tastes. So the idea there would be to make sure they eat a little of every food you want them to like to eat 6-10 times before then. I’m not sure how true it is. You could manually track which foods the baby had tasted if you wanted to help shape the baby’s tastes.

And I haven’t checked the research, but they say that talking to the baby a lot is important, so you might want to get something that can help count the number of words the baby hears. The LENA monitor can do this; I haven’t checked for alternatives.

4

Boston QS is having an event this week on Women’s Health which will include the following presentation…

Jacqueline Thong - Co-Founder and CEO, Ubiqi Health - A self-tracking project on quantifying pregnancy, post-pregnancy, and newborns.

I’ll post the video once its available.