If you have a smart speaker, can you see your child sleeping? When a baby is born, for several months, any parent suffers from stress or anxiety. Whether the baby will be able to sleep properly, tossing, not falling out of bed, breathing properly, etc.
But now, these worries may be reduced a little. The University of Washington research team devised a function to monitor infant sleep using smart speakers. It is said that you can use this function without having to replace the smart speaker you have now.
According to the research team’s research, a smart speaker can be used as a monitoring device by using a microphone built into the speaker and a wireless communication function. The so-called BreathJunior developed by the research team begins by filling the room with white noise. White noise is a sound that combines various frequencies. It also helps babies fall asleep comfortably while covering up disturbing sleep noise.
The white noise generated by the smart speaker is picked up by the built-in microphone as a reflection sound while identifying the furniture and the baby in the room. Since Breath Junior, a software, recognizes the white noise pattern in advance, it recognizes the baby’s movements if the reverberation sound generated by white noise is a different pattern. In other words, you can see the baby’s movements only with the reverberation sound.
According to the research team, detecting minor breathing differences in infants is not easy. Also, when a baby breathes, it is more difficult to detect because the chest movement is significantly smaller than that of an adult. The solution is to increase the accuracy of recognizing the reflected sound by using a smart speaker with more built-in microphones. This will allow you to know where your baby is sleeping in the room.
As a result of using a smart speaker equipped with Breath Junior in the neonatal intensive care unit to compare with the professional breathing monitor used in hospitals, it is said that it was possible to detect not only the baby’s respiratory rate but also the breathing pattern. In theory, this feature could be used by installing software on smart speakers such as Amazon Echo and Google Home. You may no longer need to spend money on baby monitoring equipment. It’s also fascinating that technology can increase the level of health care and quality of life. Related information can be found here .