Young began questioning why his family was using a device with an app that could create what he called “a false sense of trust.” If the app on your phone isn’t working, the base station will still light up and make sounds if something goes wrong, he said, but that’s only useful if you’re sleeping near it.ĭoctors have also become skeptical of the accuracy and reliability of health-tracking monitors like the Owlet Smart Sock, which debuted in 2015 and retails for $299. The Smart Sock seemed like a good investment to ensure his son’s safety while he slept. I was never any wiser until well into the next day.” “And at some point in the middle of the night, the app lost connection to the base station. “We put our child to bed at 8 o’clock and trusted the app to monitor him all night,” Jordan Young, 33, the father of a 7-month-old who lives in Nashville, said in an interview on Monday. However the last month has been extremely tough,” one father wrote, adding that the product has triggered alarms multiple times “for no reason” and has caused “more anxiety than relief.” “Hi, we have loved your product for about 5 months. (On Wednesday, the comments appeared to have been removed and were no longer visible.) Nearly 900 comments flooded the company’s Facebook page. On Sunday, Owlet said it had fixed the problem, but by then hundreds of parents had shared their frustrations on social media. Workman, a father of three who said he uses the Smart Sock to monitor his 9-month-old. “I just want to take a moment to apologize to each and every one of you for this tremendous inconvenience that we’ve caused,” said Mr. When the servers went down, parents were no longer able to see their child’s heart rate or oxygen levels on the company’s app, Kurt Workman, Owlet’s chief executive officer, said in a video statement that was uploaded to Facebook on Saturday. Owlet said that the disruption, which began last Thursday, stemmed from a bug in a new release of its app that caused its servers to crash. At the same time, these live vital sign readings and alerts are sent via Wi-Fi to parents’ phones through the Owlet smartphone app. If something goes wrong - if the sock is poorly positioned, for example, or if a baby’s blood oxygen dips to an abnormal level - the base station will emit sounds and colored lights that signify what the problem is. If the baby’s vitals are normal and the device is working properly, the base glows green. It sends data via Bluetooth to the product’s base station, a small device that must be within 100 feet of the sock. The Smart Sock uses light to measure a baby’s pulse rate and blood oxygen levels. On the surface, such devices may seem like a godsend for bleary-eyed parents: It’s impossible to watch a baby continuously for 24 hours, so why not use technology like cameras and motion sensors to ease worried minds? But experts say that these devices - particularly ones that collect medical data - aren’t always reliable and can end up making new parents even more anxious.Ĭase in point: the widespread spiral of frustration that ensued last weekend after the Owlet Smart Sock - a popular product that wraps around a baby’s foot to record sleep patterns, oxygen levels and heart rate - stopped communicating with the Owlet phone app. Worried by the rare but frightening possibility of sudden, unexpected infant death, some families are using electronic devices that allow them to not only watch their babies’ movements and listen for signs of distress, but to track health data like their pulse and the oxygen levels in their blood. It’s a question almost all new parents have asked themselves while peering into their child’s crib or bassinet: Is my baby breathing? This story was originally published on Sept.
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