A group of design students from a Swedish university published an insightful academic paper last year spoofing all the baby health trackers now pitched to parents. The trackers measure things like a baby’s breathing rate, heart rate, and sleep, and are made by startups including Mimo Baby, Owlet, Sproutling, and Monbaby.
Is this fear mongering for new moms? Or will these devices actually offer valuable data on infants? I think it’s too early to tell. But the paper does a good job of critiquing the design pitfalls of the user experience. It argues such devices could needlessly raise anxiety and remove intuition from parenting.
There’s a cool hand-drawn storyboard of a new mom deciding not to go the park with Johnny after she binges on biometric data:
Also, a good rendering of an epidemiological map overlay that would show all the kids in your neighborhood suffering from excessive booger:
