Bengaluru :
Prachi (name changed), 32, a corporate professional and single mother, is sleep-deprived. So is her five-month-old son, who wakes up in the middle of the night with sudden bouts of respiratory trouble. Despite repeated visits to the paediatrician, the infant’s condition has barely improved.
“My son often wakes up as he can’t breathe. Though I always try to comfort him and put him back to sleep, I don’t know when the next episode will occur. This has been giving us sleepless nights and is affecting my son’s health,” said the exasperated mother.
To help new moms like Prachi, three city-based techies have devised a solution, Raybaby, a non-contact baby monitor which tracks activities like sleeping and breathing. Ranjana Nair, Sanchi Poovaya and Aardra Kannan Amili used their brainchild, Kickstarter — a platform helping artists, musicians, filmmakers and designers find resources and support to make their ideas a reality — to come up with the device which was launched on January 31.
Ranjana, chief executive officer (CEO), Kickstarter, said: “This baby monitor was created to bring back sanity in their lives of new moms and dads. All products in the market and hospitals require the baby to wear the battery-operated device, which is dangerous as there have been many instances of the battery exploding. Raybaby is a first-of-its-kind non-contact baby tracker which monitors the baby’s respiratory rate with 98% accuracy.”
Supported by Johnson & Johnson and HAX as part of the joint consumer health device programme, the monitor helps new parents with sleep training and tells them when the baby is awake, asleep or sleeping, via a Smart Journal app. Its artificial intelligence system tells parents how the baby is doing and whether the child is running a fever or has any respiratory ailment like asthma or bronchitis.
Explaining how the idea was born, Ranjana said: “We were visiting a friend’s baby in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and saw that in this day and age, the respiratory rate was still being tracked by placing a hand on the baby’s chest or through uncomfortable chest bands. That was when we decided to create a device to help parents. Research and discussions with doctors showed us how the respiratory rate could be used to monitor a baby’s health in a home environment. We worked with top hardware engineers to develop a safe device.”
Speaking about the safety aspect, Sanchi Poovaya, COO, Kickstarter, said: “It is a non-contact device, which rules out the possibility of explosions or other accidents. We are using the radar technology, which works on the principle of ultrasound, and FDA-approved components.”
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Bengaluru News / by Sreemoye Chatterjee / TNN / February 15th, 2017