If a whole new kind of baby monitor designed and sold now in the US is anything to go by, the answer would soon appear to be yes.
With most baby monitors the idea is that once they are switched on and in place, you will be able to hear your baby when they start crying. You can then go up to them and make sure they are okay before sending them back off to sleep again.
So what exactly does this new type of baby monitor do that other ones don’t then?
Well the answer lies in the fact that it claims to be able to tell you why your baby is crying. This is as opposed to simply alerting you to the fact they are crying in the first place. The idea is that if they are crying because they are just sleepy, you should perhaps try leaving them and hopefully they will drop off by themselves very soon. And even if you do need to go up to them, you will know why they are crying and be able to settle them down much quicker than you might be able to otherwise.
With a traditional baby monitor you will hear your baby crying as soon as it starts. The same applies to this monitor – except that you will need to refrain from running upstairs to your baby for a few seconds. Apparently it requires twenty seconds to be able to figure out the reason for your child’s crying. Once it has done this, the unit will tell you whether your baby is hungry, bored, annoyed, sleepy or stressed. You can then act accordingly depending on what the unit tells you.
So is this the next new baby monitor that will soon be hitting the shelves in the UK? And will it take off in a big way when it does come here?
The product listing for this product doesn’t seem to say how the baby monitor works. It does mention that if there are any other sounds in the room which are happening at the same time as the crying, then it may not give the right response to your parent unit. Presumably though it works according to the tones in the crying, identifying those tones in association with what they mean.
No doubt a lot of research has gone into this product before it hit the shelves, and there will probably be a lot of parents queuing up to try it. What’s more it doesn’t appear to be that expensive either. The US dollar price on the website we found the item on was $99.99. That equates to about £61 at the exchange rates in place at the time of writing. In comparison with a lot of other baby monitors which don’t have this facility, that isn’t bad at all.
So we could be seeing a new monitor on the block – and this one is smart as well.