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PROVO — The Utah creators of a new device claim it functions as an extra set of eyes for parents of newborns. They say it uses smartphone technology to offer peace of mind.
Several tech companies now offer parents devices that monitor a baby's vital signs and sends them to their smartphones. Provo-based Owlet has spent several years designing and testing a monitor that's shipping out in the next couple of months. A couple who tested it on their newborn say it's allowed them to stop being paranoid parents.
Spencer and Kelsey Behrend say they were not sure if they were ready for another child before their daughter Kaisa was born.
"Our first three weeks were pretty rough," Kelsey said. "We didn't sleep much. In fact, we didn't sleep if she was sleeping."
Two years earlier, her older brother died in his sleep.
"Our son Caspian passed away at 4 months of SIDS," Kelsey said.
Now, they are testing a new baby monitor called Owlet. The monitor's sensors fit in a little bootie around Kaisa's left foot, feeding information to her parents' smartphones and a standalone bay.
"It tells us what her heart rate is per minute," Spencer said, "and what's called her pulse oximetry — her blood-oxygen level."
Owlet's head-of-product Jordan Monroe says the device reads a baby's vitals through a series of flashing lights.
"Owlet tells you just what you want to know, whether or not your child is OK," he said. "It's the same technology you would find in the little clip you put on the finger in the hospital."
If there's a change in the vitals or if there's movement, Owlet will alert parents either through the app or through the monitor.
"It's just like a stop light," Monroe explained. "Green means things are good. Red means there's an alert, and yellow means there's a disconnect somewhere in the system."
"She was occasionally getting a little low, not a lot, but it was alarming, alerting us she was getting low," Spencer said.
With that alarm from Kaisa's Owlet, the Behrends say they took her to the doctor.
"One of the possibilities they were looking into was apnea, but they didn't have any data. But Owlet had weeks of data on how she was sleeping, her blood-oxygen level," Spencer said.
The Behrends say Kaisa will undergo a sleep study at a hospital to determine if she really has apnea, but they say the payoff for Owlet came on they day they got it.
"It was OK to let her sleep," Kelsey said. "It was OK to take care of my other children. It was OK to sleep myself."
Monroe said the device comes with training materials to help parents make sense of the numbers beamed into their smartphones. He said this is not a diagnostic tool or a replacement for parenting, just an extra set of eyes.
Some pediatricians are very concerned devices like Owlet will give parents a false sense of security. They say parents need to make sure newborns are placed on their backs to sleep, no soft bedding in their cribs and don't share a bed with a newborn.
