Another way to feed your paranoia as a new parent. There are other monitors already which purport to monitor infants breathing, and I haven't met anyone yet who used them who recommends them. Inevitably they give false positives, and it's hell on your nerves. After a while you learn to just ignore them so you don't go insane. Then you take out the monitor because what's the point.
This is the internet, though, so people like me will always exist.
We bought a fairly cheap wearable monitor early on, and it works. Both in the sense that it has given us a couple of false positives when it got out of position, and in the more important sense that it has only done so a handful of times and the rest of the time I sleep much more soundly because I know it would go off if our child stopped breathing.
Honestly, this is not a truly hard problem to solve, and I'm kind of amazed that the APA hasn't figured that out yet. On the other hand, obviously the effect on different parents may vary.
> This is the internet, though, so people like me will always exist.
Touche. Definitely experience will vary. In my circle of friends, we were using angelcare monitors about 10 years ago, which to be fair are more about sensing movement than trying to directly detect sleep apnea. Nobody liked them, everyone stopped after a while and decided the very small risk of SIDS wasn't worth the suffering involved in trying to detect it.
That said, one of my friends did have a son pass away (on his first birthday, no less, which is pretty late for SIDS IIRC) during the night for unexplained reasons, so I can't really blame parents for being paranoid. You have to find what works for you, and for everyone that's going to be different.
as I understand, SIDS is sometimes (not always!) literally that an infant is sleeping so deeply that it forgets to breathe. Sometimes simply rousing them from the deep sleep would be able to correct the situation if it could be detected.
Oh wow. You reminded me of a mildly traumatic memory of my infant daughter literally turning blue before my eyes before taking a gasping breath and going back to normal. It was no more than a couple of seconds (babies turn blue fast), but it certainly sent my heart racing . . . I think she was crying very aggressively to get herself into that state; I forget the exact details.
I wonder what the survival rate for infant CPR is. I know for adults it's shockingly low, particularly without an AED. Pediatric AEDs exist, but I doubt many concerned parents have one.
Don't get me wrong, I support people learning CPR. It's better than nothing.
We use a baby monitor in conjunction with specifically patterned clothing. The monitor observes the pattern and assesses whether the baby is breathing - if not, it will alarm on both the phone and the crib monitor unit.
Is it strictly necessary? No. But it helps me sleep, and that means the baby sleeps better because he's not being visited and monitored by a human.
We've had one false positive in 6 months. That's an acceptable tradeoff, in my mind.
This is the Nanit monitor with the Breathing Wear band. The cost is significant - $300 for the monitor, $20+ for the band, and an annual fee after the first year. With that said, an IP-enabled monitor lets you do things like spend time outside the range of a non-IP camera (e.g. on vacation, go to the hotel pool while the baby naps), things I find extremely valuable. Naturally, there is a privacy impact that should be carefully considered.
