Tech Tools Review: Monbaby Smart Button

Most, if not all, parents will admit they have stood over their sleeping baby at least once during the night, peering into the darkness, trying to figure out if the baby is still breathing. It’s a hazard of the job, not helped by babies’ tendency to move from snuffling wildebeest to stealthy ninja mode within seconds.

As a rule, baby monitors – even the fancy, high-definition video ones – are fairly useless about alerting you to breathing problems with your baby. You have to invest in the type with motion- detecting pads that fit under the mattress, guaranteed to give you a panic attack when the baby rolls out of its range.

But there is a new generation of monitors that clip to your baby, monitoring breathing and movement and making sure all is well. The MonBaby Smart Button is simple device that fits to your child’s onesie like a large button. A plastic enclosure secures it to clothing, and takes a bit of effort to get off, so there’s little chance your baby will have the dexterity to remove it.

The MonBaby does a lot. Its sensors detect everything from breathing to activity and orientation, and trigger the appropriate alarm. The alarm is not subtle. There are different noises for different things – the proximity alert is a bit less alarming than the one that sounds for a fall or a lack of breathing detected.

This device would be most useful for those with newborn babies – or at least ones less mobile than mine – but are useful in relation to older children too. The activity alert, for example, is a good indicator of whether your toddler is not, as you presume, asleep, but is roaming the hallways. The fall alert will let you know if your child has scaled the cot sides or tumbled out of bed. You can use it outdoors to keep them within a certain radius: stray outside it and the proximity alarm goes off.

Because the MonBaby connects to your phone or tablet via Bluetooth low energy, it will suffer from all the limitations of Bluetooth. If you have a house with thick walls, or if there is a lot of wireless interference, it will be difficult for the device to keep the signal consistently.

But some phones are more prone to such difficulties than others. During the course of the review, the MonBaby was connected to three phones, two of which – both Android handsets, incidentally – kept the connection for a much further range than the third phone.

If you’re in an apartment or bungalow, you’re less likely to lose connection. My home isn’t ideal for this. We need a power-line kit to get wifi in our bedroom, so Bluetooth was always going to stutter. It was a little frustrating for it to drop the connection between the living room and the baby’s bedroom, but a little creative positioning of the mobile devices did the trick.

If someone had handed me this device in those sleep-deprived newborn days I would have had a much greater peace of mind. I lost count of the number of nights I woke up in a panic because she was just “too quiet”; having the MonBaby would have eliminated that because, trust me, there is no way you could ignore that alarm.

One thing to remember is to remove the button from the baby’s clothing once you are done with it. It nearly ended up in the wash on more than one occasion, and it’s not waterproof.

The good

Peace of mind for new parents is the best thing this monitor offers. The alerts are smart, so it won’t expect a regular breathing pattern from babies and frighten you unnecessarily. It clips to any piece of clothing, so you don’t have to invest in specific items that your child will quickly grow out of.

The not so good

If your home has a lot of interference, you may struggle to keep the Bluetooth connection. You have to configure it every time you restart the app, which is probably necessary but frustrating.

The rest

The MonBaby works with Android and Apple devices, but the apps are not the same. Both allow you to set alerts for everything from breathing to motion, and a handy little real-time tracker shows movement for the last minute. But only the Android version gives you extended graphs showing the baby’s activity over several hours, and a breakdown of how they slept – activity, quiet time, how many times they rolled.

Verdict

***

Works better with more open-plan homes. A definite mind- easer.

[ vico-electronics.com ]