There’s a scene in the movie Terms of Endearment where the relationship between the characters played by Shirley MacLaine and her screen daughter Debra Winger is illustrated by the mother obsessively waking her baby to make sure she was still breathing. I wonder if wearable baby tech is the same thing in more palatable clothing.
Babble‘s got a roundup of baby monitoring tech: Owlet (pictured here), Sensible Baby, and Sproutling. They all do essentially the same thing — track a baby’s heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen levels — and they seem to do it unobtrusively. (Though you’d better hope they’re waterproof.) The Babble article, and another more in-depth one at Fast Company, asks if this is an altogether healthy thing for the parents, never mind the babies.
It’s certain that there are lots of at-risk babies who will benefit from this kind of simple and non-intrusive monitoring. But it’s natural for people to monitor and measure precious things just because they can, not because they necessarily need to. One wonders if this kind of monitoring does more to foster insecurity that assurance. That, of course, is less a technological problem than a human one…