Baby Monitor: The Best Gadget for New Parents
The journey of parenthood requires lots of preparations and planning. It is very exciting and one of the most beautiful moments when you see your baby for the first time ever. Right after knowing the fact that they are going to become parents, the shopping for the newest member of the family starts. The shopping list goes on and on, which includes the items like clothes, diapers, crib, toys and SMART GADGETS. Yes, you heard it right, getting baby smart gadgets have become a norm for new parents. The baby gear industry is expected to cross $100 billion by the year 2025. One of the greatest inventions in the baby gear industry has to be the baby monitors. Lot of companies kept improving their baby monitor products to give a tough competition in the market.
History of the baby monitor
Nowadays, the whole purpose of the baby monitor is to have the ability to hear or see your baby and insure their safety. However, this was not the case from the beginning. Less than a hundred years ago, no one even thought about the concept of baby monitor. It was not a very common concept even fifty years ago. Forget about the past, lots of countries other than the US have never heard about baby monitors. I was born in the late ’90s and my parents never heard of baby monitors until very recent.
The invention of the baby monitor apparently has a connection to World War I, when the rise of the radio broadcasting was getting more and more popular. The basic concept of the making of the very first monitoring system was very similar to the radio broadcasting system.
In 1932 the very famous incident of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby inspired Eugene McDonald, the president of Zenith Radio Corporation to experiment on an audio baby monitor hoping to keep children safe from these types of incidents. He put together some of the basic components like radio, speaker and microphone to listen to his daughter. After getting assured results, he hired an engineer, Isamu Noguchi to design the first baby monitor in 1937.
Noguchi worked for about a year to come up with a design for a baby monitor. Later in 1938, the Zenith Radio Corporation launched a baby monitor called “Zenith Radio Nurse”. The system consisted of two units called “Guardian Ear” (baby unit) and “Radio Receiver”(parent unit). This unit cost $29.95 in 1938 which, according to dollartimes.com, is equivalent to $534.47 in 2020. The Radio Nurse had to face a lot of commercial issues. It also faced a lot of technical issues such as the radio interference from different sources, only one way communication. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a commercial failure, but it started the idea of baby monitor systems and eventually gave a direction to modern baby monitoring systems.
The Modern Monitors
Imagine buying a new TV for your home and think about how much time it takes to decide the perfect one for your house. At the same time, buying a baby monitor is also complicated as there are many options available in the market with the different functionalities. Here, I am going to evaluate Cubo AI monitoring systems.
To evaluate the system, I took the approach of interviewing people who are the users of this system. I interviewed a total of six friends and family members. Out of six, four of them are the current user of the system and the other two have used it in the past. Below are the questions that I used to find out the advantage and the flows of the system that sums up their overall experience with the system.
- What was the feature that made you choose this system over others that are available in the market?
- Did you find any other interesting feature that you didn’t know before?
- How did it help you to do your work from home in recent time?
- Do you feel that your baby is secure when using this system? Why?
- Since this is a baby monitor, there can be many users for this system in the household. How user friendly is the user interface in terms of complexity for users with different background?
- Was it easy to set up your app when you started using this for the first time?
- What was the one thing about your system that surprised you the most?
- As I know that there is only one interface for this system, which is their official app, what are the types of devices that this app is compatible with?
- Can multiple people login into the account at the same time?
- How many cameras can you sync with one account?
- As of now we are surrounded by the smart home systems, does this system compatible with Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home?
- What is the one thing that you didn’t like about using this system?
I have summarized the responses below. Also, I was not able to get a precise response for some of the questions so I had to do little research on my own to find out more information about the system.
All of the responses were positieve when I asked about the getting started with Cubo AI app for the first time. Cubo AI has two user interfaces. one is the camera which is generally mounted around the baby’s crib. And, the second interface is a virtual app which generally parents use. The User interface is very simple and yet, it provides most of the information that you might need on the home screen of the app. This is the best way to create a home screen for this type of app where users do not need to spend a lot of time by going to different screens to find the information that they need.
The most common feature that attracted most of the users was their notification system whenever the baby is crying or if their face gets covered by any object. This is a smart use of artificial intelligence to detect the face of the baby and determines their expression. A lot of people got attracted by this feature because it gives a confidence to the parents that their baby is secure.
Upon asking the question about the multiple users using the app at the same time, the response I got was mixed. According to the Cubo AI, up to eight people can use the app at the same time. However, the main concern that users had was related to privacy. Many times, there are multiple people using the app throughout the day. Those people include, but not limited, grandma watching over kids, their babysitter, any relative. The problem is that all of those people will have access to the system even though they are not supposed to watch over the system. There is no option to deactivate access to the camera at certain times for one of the accounts. This is the huge privacy aspect that this system lacks.
There are a couple of features that came out as a surprise for the users as they did not mitigate the importance of them at the time of purchasing the monitor. One feature was the indication of temperature and humidity in the baby’s room. Many of the users were first time parents and they initially did not realize how important this feature could be for the confort and the health of the baby. This monitor system has two sensors to measure the temperature and humidity at all the time and it sends out the alert notification whenever those measurements are not in the range of the doctor’s recommendation. The flaw with this monitor is that a user cannot manually change the range for those measurements. This is a critical error in the system as the product is available on the world market and the normal range might differ from region to region.
One other feature that has turned out to be an attention grabber for many of the users is the auto photo capture. With the use of AI and the sensors, Cubo’s Auto Photo Capture recognizes and takes pictures of baby’s large or unique movements such as turning over, kicking, twisting, biting their hands/feet, staring at the camera, crying, or just generally smiling. All the photos are arranged in reverse chronological order with most recent ones on top. The flaw is that the photos are only available from the past 10 days.
In addition to the flaws that I mentioned above, there are multiple issues with Cubo AI that might affect the numbers of sales due to the poor customer reviews. In this age and day, a lot of people are moving towards smart homes. Virtual assistance like google home or Alexa has been an important part of it. Cubo AI is currently not compatible with any virtual assistance systems. Another issue with compatibility is that the Cubo AI app only works on iOS and Android phones. It it not available on laptop or on web-based platforms.
Above all, the baby monitor system has been one of the best gadgets for any parent. There are many different types of systems available from them with their own unique features.
