Wondering why your baby is crying is a dilemma you are bound to face at least once in your parenting journey. It can be a frustrating experience. How should you know if the baby hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or wet? In the middle of the night, exhausted and trying to soothe your little one, you might think to yourself: there’s needs to be an app for that.
As it turns out, there is, though it’s not yet available to the public. The promising parenting tool, called LittleOne.care, is a tiny, wearable device that can help you better understand your baby’s needs. Worn over the baby’s tummy, the small apparatus measures sound and motion, finding patterns to your baby’s state of mind.
Let’s say the baby cries, and after being fed, they calm. LittleOne.care stores this information, the sounds and motions that come with being hungry and then fed, and recognizes the event when it happens again. In this way, the device, over time, can use breathing, crying, and other sounds and movements, to tell you how your baby is feeling and being cared for. It can even alert a parent to a child’s illness or a sudden boo-boo.
Is Your Response Time to Crying Consistent?
The device, made from nontoxic materials, is small at just 1.34-in x 1.34-inches, and is very thin and light, weighing a single ounce. And it can do more than interpret your baby’s cries. When your baby cries, the gadget measures how much time it takes you to respond to your baby. LittleOne.care can tell you if your response time to your baby’s cries is consistent—if it usually takes you around the same amount of time to go to your baby.
Consistency is important for babies. Knowing that mommy is predictable gives the baby a sense of safety and security. You can look at the information stored in the device to see how you are doing with consistency of care. If there’s room for improvement, you can always fine-tune your response time. In this way, the app helps parents and caregivers offer better care to their children.
The device also tracks your baby’s development and milestones. “LittleOne.Care’s main goal is to provide parents with a better understanding of their babies. Our device interprets the baby’s reason for crying in real-time and the quality of care the baby receives in the long term,” says LittleOne.Care Co-Founder and CMO Ami Meoded. “Being able to provide the most precise care to your baby while maintaining consistency will improve your baby’s mental strength as an adult. The care a baby receives during the first two years of life, has the greatest impact on their life as a whole.”
Baby Crying? Panel of Experts
In his efforts toward a more holistic way to serve parents, Meoded has enlisted a panel of experts, for instance, child development experts and pediatricians. The experts will offer parenting tips and answer parents’ questions. Parents will have the option to “favorite” the experts they like best, for future reference and help. Passionate about his brainchild, Meoded wants to do even more and is actively seeking further East and West Coast experts to advise parents on all things parenting.
When will this miracle parenting-tool become available? Ami says it will happen in about a year. “We are about to launch the Beta trail on the East and West Coasts—hence the need for more experts there. It is our hope to eventually make Littleone.care available to all parents, everywhere.”
About Varda Epstein
Varda Meyers Epstein serves as editor in chief of Kars4Kids Parenting. A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Varda is the mother of 12 children and is also a grandmother of 12. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Learning Site, The eLearning Site, and Internet4Classrooms.