The first thing to know about Sproutling, the wearable device that straps around a baby’s ankle, is that it’s not for the baby. It’s for the parents. The second is that even though ‘Fitbit for babies’ sounds clever, Sproutling doesn’t track fitness, it tracks sleep.
Baby monitors were invented in 1937 by Zenith Electronics. Any new parent today would recognize the two-way radio, billed as a “Night Nurse,” because baby monitors haven’t advanced much since.
Even the models with video screens only relay one type of information: When the baby is awake and crying. “In reality, baby monitors are really a poor extension of parents’ eyes and ears,” says Sproutling CEO and co-founder Chris Bruce.
Instead, Sproutling promises to use wearable, sensor-driven technology to give parents insight into their child’s sleeping patterns. It does this with a wearable anklet, a charging dock with a novel UI, and an app, all built by New Deal Design, the agency behind the Fitbit.
Sproutling is for babies six months and up. A soft (washable and waterproof) band fits around the baby’s ankle. Nestled in the band is a red, vaguely heart-shaped pouch that houses sensors (for heart rate, skin temperature, movement, and noise), Bluetooth LE tech, and a battery.
Those sensors capture 1,000 data points per minute, and transmit them to the Sproutling app, where parents can see their baby visualized as a flickering light (the active heart rate) on a ring (which represents a clock).
Sproutling alerts parents when babies wake up, or has a fever, and uses statistical models to create predictions for when the baby will wake up, and what conditions create the best sleeping environment.
Crafted With an Eye Towards Parental Stress
Every touchpoint—both physical and digital—is crafted with overwhelmed parents in mind. For instance, the band can be fastened with one hand.Likewise, the bowl-shaped charging dock uses new inductive resonance charging technology so that when it’s time for a diaper change parents can scoop up their baby with one hand, and simply drop the wearable onto the charger with the other.
The app uses animations, not hard numbers, to provide an at-a-glance reassurance that your baby is alive and well (“New parents aren’t going to know if 130 beats per minute is better than 90, and without the medical context to understand vitals data it’s just going to cause more fear and anxiety and needless calls to the doctor,” Bruce says.)
And if parents use the app to track multiple Sproutling-wearing babies, a color-coded bar explaining each child’s status (okay, not okay) will stay live on the screen at all times.
Bruce and co-founder Matthew Spolin met in 2012 at a consumer health startup. Both had babies at the time, and, like new parents are wont to do, they shared stories about their kids and their anxiety-inducing sleep behavior.
But when they took the idea of a wearable for babies to pediatricians and OBGYNs, they got pushback. “They said technology in the hands of parents isn’t a good idea, because they don’t know that the heart rate fluctuates throughout the day, that it changes as they get older,” Bruce says.
The Sproutling team explained their approach—animations and information on a need-to-know basis—and won them over (those doctors are advisors to Sproutling).
Sproutling is also banking on a larger cultural shift: This generation of new parents are millennials. “They grew up with a smartphone in their pocket, so they’re looking for technology to solve their problems,” Spolin says.
That’s also why they ditched old product packaging tropes—pink for girls, blue for boys, and pictures of smiling moms—in favor of an organic, muted product. “We’ve worked hard to make it not look like technology,” Bruce says.
