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Smart Baby-Trackers Mostly Unnecessary, Say US Doctors (bbc.com)
A group of pediatricians has called for smart health-trackers, designed to monitor babies while they sleep, to be regulated by the same US body that oversees other medical equipment. An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: The monitors, which often take the form of sensors fitted to clothing or nappies, measure signs such as heart rate and breathing during sleep. The data is shared with a phone app. The doctors spoke out after seeing babies being brought to A&E after smart-monitor false alarms. The team from the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia said the devices should be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One brand they mentioned was Owlet, which sells a $250 monitor that tracks sleeping babies' heart rates and oxygen levels via a sensor concealed inside his or her sock. It says on its website that it has already submitted a medical version to the FDA for approval. "For most healthy babies there is not a role for home monitoring at all," said neonatologist Dr Elizabeth Foglia, one of the authors of the opinion piece published by the American Medical Association journal Jamanet.
and you kid will die without you knowing and you will feel guilty
run out and buy it now before your baby dies
Yup, if my precious little infant has a blip in his data, I'm going to rush him to the Arts & Entertainment cable network immediately.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I had the MIMO baby monitor for my first child and that thing just straight up didnt work.
Talked to the company and they replaced every part of the entire setup and still no luck. They had a rep come out to my house and try to set it up for me and still no luck. They would refund me though because it was a gift and the person that gave it to me didnt have the receipt...
These things are in the hundreds of dollars range and to some people it is worth it, but it really is just a way to help mom calm her tits.
1st World Non-Problems.
Just do like the poor people do - pop em out and let em run amok.
> For most healthy babies there is not a role for home monitoring at all
Even if the actual odds that there will be a problem for the monitor to catch are low, there is some value for an anxious new parent in being able to fall asleep easier, knowing that at least the new baby is breathing normally, etc.
In other words, the value isn't only in the monitor alarming, the reassurance of the steady pulsing of the monitor showing that breathing and heart rate are fine has some value. I didn't *buy* something like this for my baby, but I would have used it if I got one as a gift. I would also keep in mind that the monitor can only tell me "go check on your baby", no need to panic if the sensor slips off or whatever.
Good point. With these, government agencies can step in and accuse any parent of not taking proper care of their babies. Although that doesn't lead to Trump: he is not a Libertarian. Had these been the concerns of the public at large, we would be looking at President Rand Paul today
Look, I agree that these devices are mostly unnecessary, but mostly is the key word. If you have an infant that died of SIDS*, you would find absolutely no comfort in the fact that the doctor told you that you'd probably not need this monitor.
Some parents do need to calm down and not rush their kids to the ER for every hangnail, and if your monitor alarms but your baby is fine, then be grateful, but don't freak out. There will be some children saved by this device, and those parents will be more than happy with every penny they spent on it.
My kids are all past the age of needing to worry about this, but I've gone through a few heart-stopping moments with each of them. Honestly, I'd probably buy one, but an alarm wouldn't automatically send me to the hospital (I would call an ambulance, of course, if my child were unconscious and not breathing, and I have had to do that once).
*Doctors say they don't know what causes SIDS, but I am almost positive that some (incredibly rare, very small percentage) children contort themselves into a position while sleeping that suffocates them. Not all of their biological processes are fully developed and their muscle tone is very poor, so if they get into a position where they can't breathe, there's a good chance they'll suffocate to death. And because everybody is asleep and the whole thing is silent, parents won't know until morning. This monitor would cure SIDS if my theory is right.
I purchased a Snuza Hero and used it on my two children. It's not connected to my network, it just sounds an alarm if it no longer detects breathing. My doctor warned me they are unnecessary, but I wanted the peace of mind. There were false alarms, but that was ok in my opinion.
Network connectivity is a little extreme for something like this. All I want is something to tell me if my baby is alive or not. I'm not going to analyze blood oxygen levels or heart rate data.
At the end of the day, I would do it again. I can live with a few false positives and it gave me some piece of mind.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Medical science has largely stagnated in this country over the last few decades, due to the enormous amount of red tape and expense needed to bring medical technology to the market.
Seriously: think back to all the articles we see here at Slashdot: 3-d printing skin, growing human organs in pigs, curing diabetes in mice, and so on. We've been seeing these articles for about 20 years, but nothing high-tech or disruptive has entered into common practice.
It's gotten so bad that many people in the hacker community are making their own "mild" (my term) medical devices. Prosthetics by 3-d printer, home-built hearing aids, glasses that can be tuned and set by a non-professional... even some frighteningly potentially dangerous items such as electric brain stimulation devices.
Check out Hackaday.io for a long list of these. There's actually a vibrant community of people doing interesting medical things "to themselves" or "based in a 3rd world country"(*).
So now a bunch of doctors are getting bothered by parents who take the trouble to monitor their infants, and their solution is to have the FDA regulate the devices. Because making less bother for doctors is totally what the FDA is for. Assuming the device doesn't itself cause a medical problem, there's no reason the FDA should regulate it. There's not even any reason to regulate the accuracy of such a device (let the market, or industry standards compliance handle that aspect).
"For most healthy babies there is not a role for home monitoring at all," said neonatologist Dr Elizabeth Foglia, one of the authors of the opinion piece published by the American Medical Association journal Jamanet.
The "most healthy babies will do just fine" line is an appeal to historical evidence, where we *didn't* have this sort of information. It may very well be that historical monitoring could turn over predictable evidence of future problems such as SIDS.
To take an extreme example, "washing hands" between child delivery was strongly opposed by the doctors of the time, probably using the same logic as these doctors are using today. In most normal cases, washing hands shouldn't matter.
The FDA should focus on whether the device hurts patient, and leave everything else open.
Anything else will make for further stagnation in the field.
(*) I follow one project that aims to automate detecting TB in 3rd world countries. Completely ad-hoc, done by a handful of students in a SA community college.
Buy it or get black listed in GOP care.
And we will just them to black list people as well.
I thought half the point of putting the baby to sleep was to get a few minutes/hours to yourself to recuperate. Unless your kid is deathly ill, who would want to strap an beeping/blooping health monitor to it? (Have you ever tried to sleep in a hospital?)
You are of course welcome to parent your own way.
> like humans and pre-humans have done for literally millions of years right
Up through the 16th century, about half of all children died before reaching 16 years of age. You mentioned "pre-humans": gorillas have an infant mortality rate of about 50%. Today, developer nations have infant mortality rates well under 1%.
Unless you're cool with a 50-50 chance of killing your kid, "the way it was done for millions of years" is a TERRIBLE argument.
In fact, it's an anti-American argument. Whatever we've started doing differently in the last couple hundred years has reduced infant mortality from 50% to 0.5%, so doing whatever people used to do is putting your kid's life at risk.
Just a gimmick, (like adult health trackers) to get you into their profiling system as early as possible. We'll have those targeted ads ready for you the first day the child uses the net!
Wtf phone, "anti-American argument"? I said anti-argument!
Maybe I should use the Preview feature.
Anyway, "people did it this way until modern times" is used to sell parents on a bunch of really bad ideas. Whenever you hear that, it's wise to remember the second half of the sentence, "people used to do it THIS way - and half of them died". Now most people do it this other way, and don't die.
That is a general statement that still isn't true for everything. Many "modern" people have babies by C-section and use formula instead of breastfeed, and both of those "modern" techniques have been found to be worse for a baby and should be avoided if at all possible.
Look. These "Smart Babies" are dangerous. Regular babies will cry all night and keep their parents up, but when you combine this lack of diurnal schedule with the cunning intelligence of "Smart Babies" you'll have infants crawling out of bed, hatching plots in the middle of the night! Looking for the cookie jar, wandering outside, making off with the silver! Stealing the breath of the family cat!
Smart babies must be monitored! Won't somebody think of the babies?!
-- "Oh. This guy again."
A perfectly healthy mom, with a perfectly healthy, properly positioned baby, would be better off not having a C-section. Any of a number of complications make C-section safer than vaginal delivery.
Countries with C-section rates below 7% have significantly higher mortality than countries with higher rates. This is probably because breech babies and other complications. Mortality rates continue to improve until C-sections account for about 19% of deliveries.
Above 19% c-sections (here's looking at you, California), mortality rates increase. This is probably because such a high rate indicates c-sections are being performed when there is no medical reason to do so, with perfectly healthy moms and infants.
There was a study about this in JAMA in 2015 if you'd like more details.
The issue comes up when the device's purpose is to tell you to go to the doctor. Now!
My fitbit tells me my pulse rate, body temperature, and breathing. That's fine. But it doesn't sound an alarm if it detects that I have stopped breathing or that my heart has stopped or that my body temperature is "too high" or "too low." It reports numbers and it's up to me to interpret them. I might end up getting some advice from a doctor about where is a good place for my pulse rate to be depending on how hard I'm exercising and the like, or I may just work from experience.
But if a device is going to be offering a medical opinion--get thee to an ER post-haste--then it probably should have some checking to make sure that it's operating correctly. If my sleeping infrant's pulse rate goes from 75 to 0 in 1 second, it's probably more likely that the device has slipped than that my child's heart has suddenly stopped, so it should be able to either (a) detect that it has slipped--perhaps some some of accelerometer that went off before this or (b) that the pulse monitor is no longer receiving accurate readings.
Yes, I know--all that paperwork is a nuisance. And, yes, doing that paperwork costs money which is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. I mean, why should I have to pay $500 for a monitor for my at-risk child that cost the company $50 to build and $250 to get approved? And the answer is that without that approval process, the device would be only $25 to build, cost $250, and would often report errors which would cost all of us money because of trips to the ER.
Well a lot of people didn't for various reasons. Dumb luck isn't a great strategy.
You think when a little baby is finally asleep the parents are going to *watch tv*? You don't have kids, do you?
Little ones have to be fed every couple hours, meaning the parents have to get up and feed them every couple hours. When the baby finally falls asleep, most parents want to do one thing - go to sleep, for a couple hours until they have to get up again.
I'd just use an IR camera, myself. No need to put the sensor on the baby itself. As long as the baby's temperature isn't changing in an unexpected way, there's nothing wrong with it.
To listen and annoy the babies with the hacked trackers. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
>> When the baby finally falls asleep, most parents *WANT TO* do one thing - go to sleep
> Do you also fall asleep at work?
Several times when she was small, yes. Sometimes drooling on the keyboard, sometimes on the floor, with the pillow I brought to the office. Sometimes I took a vacation day to sleep during work hours.
> What about if the baby falls asleep in the back of a car, does the car suddenly swerve off the road and into a tree?
Rumble strips saved us more than once. Twice we unexpectedly woke up in the parked car, when we didn't make it out of the car after arriving at our destination. A few times we intentionally slept in the parking garage, because taking her out of the car might wake her up.
That is useful for telling you that your baby has died, but what is wanted is a device which tells you that your baby is about to die, so that you can do something about it. You don't need a device to tell you that your baby is dead, you'll find that out when you pick it up for the morning shake.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"For most healthy babies there is not a role for home monitoring at all."
Today's parents don't feel like they can ever take their eyes off of their children. The device gives these people a chance to sleep a little. And if catches that one-in-a-million Sudden Infant Death Syndrome case, so much the better. Plus, think of all the data being collected!
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped