Description

MonBaby Smart Baby Monitor

It’s no secret that new parents are anxious and restless when they first meet their little bundle of joy. When we first brought our son home from the hospital, we stared at his tiny, sleepy face and we were a little scared. What if something goes wrong? Or if he stops breathing? And if he spits up and starts choking? The possibilities were a little overwhelming for both of us just as we couldn’t stop staring and smiling at the miracle of life. After all the horror stories we had read and watch online, we couldn’t help but, as responsible parents, worry. Fast forward a few challenging months, and just as we thought that we are getting into a rhythm, we got a Monbaby smart baby monitor, and it turned out to be a welcome revelation. This little device gave us the peace of mind that we were lacking in our lives. In many ways, Monbaby is a brilliant idea wonderfully executed. It provides parents with the reassurance they need, all in a small, easy to use, and relatively affordable package.

Features and functionality

Unlike in-room baby monitors, Monbaby is a smart monitor that your baby wears on his chest. It provides incredibly helpful information about your baby’s sleeping patterns. A feature that we really appreciated is the breathing check, something that every new parent, inevitably, does. In our case, we would get right up close to our sleeping baby to see if he was still breathing alright. The problem is that in our efforts to make sure he was sleeping ok, we would wake him up and then to our dismay, the whole process of getting him back to sleep restarts. The breathing checks does this for you so you can walk away reassured the little one is breathing ok.

In addition to this, you have the option of adding MonBridge WIFI Bridge to the purchase, which we recommend. It allows you to use your home’s wifi network and get the MonBaby’s alerts and metrics anywhere in your home with the added benefit of premium customer support.

With Monbaby and the wifi bridge, we get tracking for our baby’s breathing plus also movement and sleep position, specifically if the baby flips over to his belly while sleeping (something that paediatricians advise against because of SID – sudden infant death/ cot death). Because of the wifi bridge, it is a BlueTooth smart monitor working with either an iOS and Android app. If anything goes wrong or our baby’s movements stop or worst, gets himself in the wrong position, we get an instant notification. Our son was just starting to roll over a lot in his sleep by the time we got our Monbaby, and the device told us every time he flipped, which made a world of a difference in reducing our anxiety. As our baby grew and the rolling was not an issue anymore, we simply turned this feature off. That’s another nice thing about the Monbaby app that we noticed, it is extremely easy to switch on and off the notifications you want to receive.

Tracking your baby’s growth

Monbaby is not just for infants or newborns. Once your baby is mobile and starts exploring the world around him, you can switch on proximity alerts so you get to know if your baby has crawled a certain distance from you. You should always watch your baby but as all parents know, all it takes is getting distracted for a second for your little one to wander off. There’s also a fall detection monitor, which is useful for toddlers learning to walk.

On top of this, the sleep information that the Monbaby app provides is very helpful. You can learn your baby’s sleep patterns and maybe understand why he or she keeps waking up at three in the morning. In our case, our son did exactly that, the cheeky monkey was hungry and demanded attention! But having the knowledge beforehand that he would consistently wake up at around midnight helped us to be proactive about finding out why, and eventually understanding the reason why.

Snap and Go system

It’s understandable that many parents are apprehensive about snapping any sort of small accessory on their baby, given all the warnings about an injury or choking that moms and dads are bombarded with. But Monbaby is a little button-sized that’s easy to snap on any outfit. We never experienced any problems to slide the back of the device under our son’s baby clothing, and then snap the front in place.

There are no pins or sharp endings to ruin their cute little clothes but incredibly the fitting is all very secure. So far, our boy hasn’t been able to pull it off his clothes. In fact, it is so small that he has kind of forgotten it is there at all. Monbaby is lightweight at around 68g, and while it is small at 1.3 inches in diameter, it’s not considered a choking hazard. It would have to be 1.2 inches or smaller to fall in that category.

Complete tracking solution

One of the most convenient aspects of Monbaby is that it goes where you go. Unlike standard baby monitors, which have to remain plugged in and won’t go from room to room unless you physically move them, Monbaby moves with your baby. As long as you’ve got your paired smartphone or tablet with you and the MonBaby Smart Baby Monitor clip on your baby, you’ve got a fully functioning smart monitor. The connection between the two, however, maxes out at around 60 feet, which is admittedly lower than a lot of non-smart monitors but should be a long enough range for an average-size home.

Are there any radiation concerns?

Our biggest concern about MonBaby Smart Baby Monitor, or any other wireless device that we might use with our baby, was radiation. While it’s no secret that smartphones and other gadgets emit very low levels of radiation, we weren’t sure about exposing our child to these potentially dangerous emissions, especially when he was so tiny.

We were pleased to find out that Monbaby addresses these concerns on their website with data, figures and comparisons. Cell phones are limited to 1.6 W/kg standard absorption rate or SAR. The SAR of regular baby monitors is between 0.01 and 0.08 W.kg, and the SAR of BlueTooth devices is roughly 0.001 W/kg. Monbaby uses BlueTooth LE, which has a lower SAR than standard BlueTooth. The company assures its customers: “A BLE device like Monbaby has 10-80 times less radiation than a standard baby monitor.”

Limitations

While we really liked using Monbaby as our son’s baby monitor, we quickly became aware of some of its limitations. For starters, there’s no audio monitoring. We found ourselves wanting to hear our boy’s babbling as he woke up, but there’s no microphone to give parents this small but meaningful indulgence. However, according to the Monbaby website, plans for the next generation of the product do include a microphone. Similarly, there’s no video monitoring, but again, Monbaby website assures customers that plans are being made to integrate the device with a video monitor.

Finally, there’s no temperature monitor or heart rate sensor on Monbaby. The former could be helpful to help parents determine the ideal temperature for a good night’s rest, and the latter could help to let parents know that their baby might be getting sick or feverish. There’s no mention of these things on the Monbaby website, but it seems like they could be included in future iterations of the device.