Warning SIGNS
Four dads built an infant health monitor, Owlet, that is winning over investors and parents. Doctors are another matter.
Thirty minutes after Sara Brandon put her newborn to sleep one night last December, she received a notification on her cellphone. The red alert indicated that her son had stopped breathing. Brandon found him lifeless in his crib and called 911—in time for paramedics to revive him.
Brandon’s son had been wearing Owlet’s Smart Sock, a device that tracks heart rate and oxygen levels. “The doctors and nurses all agreed that the Owlet alarm helped, because I wouldn’t have checked on him otherwise,” says the mom of four. Doctors and nurses won’t endorse the product because it hasn’t been approved by the Food & Drug Administration, but Owlet shared Brandon’s story on the company blog and in Facebook ads. It also suggested that Forbes speak with Brandon, who volunteered that without Owlet, she’d be “planning a funeral.” That, says CEO Kurt Workman, doesn’t mean Owlet is claiming to have saved the baby’s life: “The mom went to save the baby’s life, and the mom is the hero.”
Targeting anxious, tech-savvy Millennial parents, Owlet has sold almost 150,000 Smart Socks, now priced at $299, producing $19 million in revenue last year, and it’s projecting as much as $30 million this year. The company has raised $25 million in funding and plans to expand internationally.
Workman, 28, says he got the idea in 2012 when he and his wife, Shea, made the rounds of doctors’ offices as they planned for a family. Shea had been born with a heart defect, and the couple, then students at Brigham Young University, feared their children might inherit the condition. “We have monitoring on our cars and pets and homes,” he says, “but parents wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if their baby has stopped breathing.”
Workman started researching pulse oximetry, a medical technology used in hospitals to monitor vital signs. Three BYU classmates—jordan Mon-