Sleep Tracking for Infants and Parents
I have chosen to examine two products designed to track the sleep and well-being of infants, with specific attention to marketing emphases on improvement of parental sleep quality. The Mimo and Owlet products use wearable sensors to monitor combinations of the movement, heart rate, respiration, temperature and blood oxygenation of infants. Data from those sensors are used to generate visualizations and alerts delivered via mobile and web interfaces. These interfaces allow parents to monitor the above-mentioned metrics, along with user-reported information on infants’ routines (feeding/diapering/etc.) and vital statistics that can be tracked over time.
Both products’ web sites feature prominent claims of improvements in parental sleep quality. The underlying premise of these claims is that the knowledge of active monitoring will give parents a confidence that will allow them to sleep more comfortably and consistently. In an unstructured literature review, I was unable to find studies that had evaluated the benefits of infant monitoring devices on parental sleep. The literature on infant and parent sleep has tended to focus on the effects of co-sleeping and/or parent education on the amount of parental sleep and psychometrics surrounding tiredness and stress. Among the papers that I reviewed, there were consistent findings that infant and parent sleep can be effectively improved when parental expectations are adjusted and intervention behaviors are reduced. (Wolfson 1992, Hisock 2002, Sadeh 2010). Given these findings, we would expect that the Mimo and Owlet products’ effectiveness would rely upon similar influences on parental belief and behavior.
I believe that these products may be valuable tools for optimization of pre-sleep routines, and that they might provide an effective source of engagement to adjust parents’ beliefs and actions surrounding infant sleep and waking behaviors. With that said, I have some concern that alerts from the mobile device may be unnecessarily disruptive, and that careful adjustment of sensitivity and specificity thresholds will be critical to maintain system credibility and avoid unnecessary prompts for parental intervention. Given the target audience, it also may be that real-time alerts are effective only in extremely rare cases, and that they are included as a necessary feature for product adoption.
I find these devices provocative for several reasons. One is that they promise to provide sleep and comfort to one human being by providing data about another. I see interesting implications for this kind of augmented care giving, especially in regards to relationships between elders and their adult children. Another reason is that the alert functions represent a feature that may drive a purchase, but that the user may hope to never use. This is common in products like smoke detectors and home security system, and hints at the expansion norms surrounding prevention and alerts for rare injury events. A third intriguing aspect of these products is the continuation of a trend in using sensor technology to sell sleep. While wearable sensors have been marketed as exercise tracking tools for some time, marketing materials have increasingly identified sleep as an area for optimization. In contrast to weight and heart health, which may take weeks or months to change, the promise of these products is that actions today can have a measurable impact on sleep tonight. The appeal of this immediacy is a valuable lesson for development of new tools for well-being.
References:
Hiscock, H., and M. Wake. “Randomised controlled trial of behavioural infant sleep intervention to improve infant sleep and maternal mood.” BMJ 324.7345 (2002): 1062.
Sadeh, Avi, Liat Tikotzky, and Anat Scher. “Parenting and infant sleep.” Sleep Medicine Reviews 14.2 (2010): 89-96.
Wolfson, Amy, Patricia Lacks, and Andrew Futterman. “Effects of parent training on infant sleeping patterns, parents’ stress, and perceived parental competence.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 60.1 (1992): 41.