Baby, unplugged: can sleep monitors make me a better parent?

When my daughter Ella was little, I’d often see various tech products on my Facebook feed purporting to calm parents who were anxious about their baby’s sleep. Next to feeding, there’s likely no more anxiety-prone part of the day than a child’s bedtime – the fear they’re not on a schedule, or that once they get on one, it’s the wrong one, or that once they’re actually asleep, they might never wake up.

I dismissed them out of hand – we were sharing a room with Ella, and I was aware of her every snort and snuffle, though in retrospect, it seems obvious that we could have had her sleeping through the night a little earlier … if we’d only settled on a sleep training method.

Whichever one you pick neatly slots you into a parental taxonomy. Are you an adherent of Dr Richard Ferber’s method, popularized in the 1980s, which encourages you to let your child “cry it out” until you’re popping Xanax like popcorn? Perhaps you’re a disciple of Twelve Hours’ Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old, which guarantees as much, so long as you’re willing to track her food and occasionally forcefeed her like a foie gras goose. Or maybe you purchased a California King bed the day you found out you were pregnant, and now all sleep together, your breasts exposed to the night air so Junior can sidle up and have a sip whenever he’d like. We opted for an amalgam of each, and at around four months old Ella successfully dropped the horrible 3am feed.

But by the time our second daughter, Charlotte, was born in 2019, the landscape was a smidge different. The sleep tracker market was booming and my tech-loving husband started sending me links to various products promising us peace and serenity. There was Harvey Karp’s Snoo, the $1,495 smart bassinet that kicks data back to your phone while it jiggles your baby to sleep – sometimes so quickly it looks like she’s about to launch from Cape Canaveral. There was the Owlet smart sock, which tracks your child’s heart rate as he sleeps and issues an alarm if something is awry. There was the Miku Pro Smart Baby Monitor, which allows you to see, in real time, your baby’s “breathing waveform”, should that be up your alley.

I clicked on one, mostly because it seemed to have taken sleep monitoring to Onion headline–level extremes.The Nanit is an award-winning camera that uses night vision and machine learning to track your child’s movements and then spits out a sleep score in the morning. The number factors in how long it took the child to fall asleep, how many times the parent came in, and how deep the sleep was.

When I told a friend with five children about it, she snorted.

“As if I need data to know how well my children sleep,” she replied. “Either I feel like hell in the morning, or I feel like hell warmed over.”

But, fresh to the world ofman-tomanparenting, and coming to dread a bedtime when I had to nurse one baby while the other threw Scarface-level tantrums in her room, I decided to do a solid for my family, and got in touch with Nanit HQ.

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“Putting a child to sleep is one of the first problems you’re dealing with as a new parent. The Nanit helps you formalize a strategy,” Assaf Glazer, Nanit’s founder and former CEO, tells me when we meet at the midtown WeWork where he used to house part of the company.

Glazer – bald, clean-shaven, formerly of the Israel Defense Forces – completed his PhD at the Technion in Haifa, specializing in machine learning and computer vision, and later worked on solutions for missile defense systems. When he became a parent, he found himself working late at night, checking in on his son Udi, and wondering something only a former Israeli air force pilot would ever wonder: can I apply process control to a baby?

He knew that if the answer turned out to be yes, he had an audience. On average, parents lose 44 days of sleep during the first year of a baby’s life.

The camera Glazer developed uses smart sensors to transmit sound and motion notifications to your phone and, by tracking sleep patterns over time – specifically with your child, but also by bundling the data of thousands of babies and millions of nights of sleep – it offers sleep tips to groggy parents.