It was 15 years ago this week that my son Chase Cringely died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) at age 74 days. I wrote about it at the time and there was a great outpouring of support from readers. Back then, before the advent of social media, parents didn’t get a chance to grieve in print the way Mary Alyce and I did. We shed a light on SIDS and, for a couple years, even led to some progress in combating the condition, which still kills about 4,000 American babies each year.
When you lose a child, especially one who dies in your lap, as Chase did with me, you can just curl up and die yourself or you can try to fix the problem. With the help of readers all over the world I tried and failed to build a practical SIDS warning device with the idea of not curing SIDS, but avoiding it. You see the syndrome only lasts for about 11 months, from age 1 month to one year. And while events such as Chase’s can’t be made not to happen, with proper detection and the simplest of alarms the baby can be literally roused out of death.
Alas, in 2002, while we knew what we were looking for, the cost of a proper warning device was just too high for the market to bear at that time. We used ex-KGB biometric monitoring technology that worked but pretty much required a PC (or a hefty FPGA) to work and the market definitely wasn’t ready to pay for that. And don’t get me started on the FDA, which was useless.
But times have changed and I realized tonight talking about it with my surviving children that we’re now in an era where a cloud SIDS alarm is really possible. I’m too old to build one so I’m going to tell you how to do it if you want to carry that torch.
I think the perfect platform for a cloud SIDS alarm is a $49.99 Amazon Echo Dot virtual assistant. I suspect an unmodified Dot would do the job, though it requires running a SIDS Alexa app that has yet to be written.
The goal of the alarm is to monitor the sleeping baby’s heart, detect a SIDS event, then set off a very loud alarm to rouse the baby because waking Mama often doesn’t work. So the Dot will be listening for the baby’s heart, monitoring its pattern, then blasting a loud noise if SIDS is detected. I know I just wrote pretty much the same thing twice but the sequence is that important.
Don’t use this Dot for anything except as a SIDS alarm. If you want it to play lullabies or act as a regular baby monitor, then buy another Dot for that. Place the SIDS Dot UNDER the crib, upside down attached to the mattress with velcro. Though the heartbeat sound has to go through the mattress to the Dot, it’s often quieter under there and sometimes the mattress springs will sympathetically vibrate, making detection easier.
We have to increase the accuracy of the microphones in the Dot. The technique is to use all seven microphones individually to detect the heartbeat, comparing them to each other and sampling over a sliding window of 5-6 seconds of time to properly identify the right sound. A software band-pass filter might help, too. This process is essentially an audio version of what’s called “super-resolution” in video processing. We want to isolate that little heart and really listen to it.
Now you’d think that detecting SIDS once you can hear the heart would be as simple as setting-off the alarm whenever you no longer can hear it. Nope, that won’t work. Maybe, instead of the baby dying, it’s just been moved to the changing table. You don’t want to set off a 120 dB siren every time you change a diaper!
Fortunately there’s an easier way to detect SIDS, but you have to know what you are listening for. The American SIDS Institute (today in Naples, Florida, but in our day it was in Marietta, Georgia), has an audio library of SIDS deaths that actually happened while on a heart monitor. Remember what I said about parents being too tired to hear the alarm? Sadly the Institute has quite a selection of SIDS deaths to choose from and analysis of those deaths shows there is a characteristic slowing of the heart prior to a SIDS death. In every case the pattern (the rate of deceleration) is the same and the result is that death can almost always be predicted several minutes before it actually happens. That’s plenty of time to intervene, IF you know to do so.
So the Dot listens not just for the baby’s heart but especially for that characteristic slowing pattern. Only then does the loud alarm go off. And with the Dot right under the baby, that should be enough to save the day.
Now somebody go out and build that app!
Chase would thank you. I thank you, too.
I would want such a device to emit some confirmation (acoustic or optical) indication when it re-acquires the heartbeat signal of the baby (after, e.g. a diaper change). Without that you’ll never know if the device is (still) guarding your baby. I am not familiar with the Amazon Echo Dot; maybe it has some LEDs that you could use for this.
is an echo the best fit here? I love my echo but it is far from fallible, especially if more sounds compete for her attention, which feels like a bigger problem the more sensitively you tune the mic which would surely be required for detecting a baby’s tiny heart beat. Fallibility here means false alarms and I don’t know how many of those terrified parents would cope with before disabling the feature and 1 star reviewing the app.
When our daughter was in that vulnerable window we had a baby monitor with a sensor that sat between the mattress of the crib and some plywood. It was incredibly sensitive and I’d see feedback for just gently running my fingertips over the mattress. If this sensor felt nothing for 10 seconds it warned a pip, at 30 seconds the alarms blared. The pip typically sounded if we forgot to turn it off during feeds/changes so far from fully automated. But we had ZERO false alarms.
I feel iterating over this design to remove the manual steps (more automated) is a better endeavor than taking something like the dot way out of its comfort zone where there is surely way more margin for error.
Cheers
Does waking the baby actually work to prevent death? You stated something that made it seem so, but I have not read up on this so do not know. If that is so, maybe a wearable device, like a mini-Fitbit would be a useful tool here…they (or a different wearable) should have enough sensors to detect the slowing heart rate and either buzz/vibrate to wake the baby, emit an alarm (loudness compromised by size) or trigger an alert on other devices….or all of the above.
With the tech available today, it seems ludicrous to me that this situation is not easily solved, or at least improved.
I think using something like angelcare baby monitor as a starting point would be better than the dot. It is a big pad underneath the matress with a monitor. We used it when our kids were little and it worked great. Now their kit is designed to detect lack of movement. Not sure if it could be used as is or would need to monitor the heart directly.
Yeah, we used the Angel Care under-mattress mat. It went off a few times – once when our daughter scooted all the way to the edge of the mattress where it didn’t recognize the movement and then after she figured out how to get out of her crib. We used that for years with our son to discourage him from getting out of bed and playing at night.
I too use angelcare, and it correctly sounded the alarm when no movement is detected. I am not sure about missing alarms, but for the times it did sound, my son was off the mat.
I didn’t know about your son and am truly sorry. I’ve known other SIDS parents and would like very much for there to be effective and inexpensive warning systems. I think technology will get us there. Amazon Echo could be a good path forward.
As one who works in technology I am also disturbed by the regular reports during summer months of infants and toddlers left in overheating cars. Could technologists please develop an effective warning system for this also? I’m thinking something that 1) detects presence of passengers, 2) monitors for dangerous temperature, and 3) calls police, others, honks the horn if conditions 1) and 2) are met. Can’t engineers do this with a handful and few dollars worth of parts?
Shouldn’t be hard to build, but the people who would buy this aren’t likely to be the kind of people who would leave their kid in a hot car! By virtue of choosing to purchase it, you become a person who is aware of the danger.
Unless you can convince car manufacturers to install them as part of a feature pack (e.g. when you get a DVD player, you get overheating protection), I don’t think it’s practical.
“…infants and toddlers left in overheating cars. Could technologists please develop an effective warning system for this also?”
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There have been a number of such systems, including many put forth on Kickstarter. However, unlike another KS project mentioned here, it looks like most of them weren’t funded. I didn’t look into them because my kids are all old enough that I wasn’t worried about it.
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But, yes, it seems to me that car seat manufacturers could, very cheaply, put a bluetooth device in their seats to track whether or not the restraints are buckled and that automakers could use the bluetooth they already include (even in my ultra-cheap commuter beater) to check that status when the car is turned off and/or locked and, sound the horn/alarm if the carseat restraints are still buckled.
Additionally, the car seat could have a weight-check where, if weight is detected, the engine is engaged, and the buckles are NOT snapped in on the car seat, then you are alerted via Bluetooth/car speakers.
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I accidentally drove to the store (only a short distance luckily) only to find that I had put my child in the car seat, arms through the straps, but failed to buckle her in. I was horrified by my oversight but I have to imagine that other parents, who are likely also sleep deprived, have done this as well.
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Luckily nothing happened, but if anything had I don’t know how I could live with myself. Seems like if we’re adding features this one seems easy enough to implement (just don’t put your grocery in the car seat when you’re driving, otherwise it’ll go off…)
“only to find that I had put my child in the car seat, arms through the straps, but failed to buckle her in. ”
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I’ve done that as well… I think we all have. I also had the issue of a toddler who would undo the buckles themselves. So, yeah, a bluetooth-enabled car seat would be a very good thing.
I can’t find such an audio library but would like to look into this more… can’t find performing a search on sids.org nor just a general google search for SIDS deaths audio library, etc. keywords.
Has anyone found this audio library?
“I’m too old to build one so I’m going to tell you how to do it if you want to carry that torch.”
This is a terrible time to bring this up: Are you also too old to reply to your Kickstarter? Too old to be responsible for funds you were supplied? Too old to demonstrate to your children how dad takes action for the delays?
You are truly, truly insane. You really need to get professional help.
While even I feel hesitant about bringing MineServer up on a post about children dying (old people dying is okay), I do agree that @NA has a very valid point.
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The issue of SIDS is no laughing matter and I cannot fathom how much pain that must have caused you nor would I wish it on anyone. That said, how can you make a comment like “I’m too old to build one” after just accepting $35k to seemingly do a similar technical challenge?
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I want to be on your side on this matter, especially on this post in particular, but you’re making it very difficult. Every time I start to feel a bit of humanity for you and remorse for my actions (which isn’t much), you have more verbal diarrhea and I remember that this could all go away if you stopped taking the hours to research and write these posts and just wrote in the comments here or on the KS site:
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“I f’ed up. No MineServers are coming. I know sorry doesn’t excuse me, but I AM sorry. There are no remaining funds and I dipped into my own pockets to try to rectify this months ago, but it didn’t work. No refunds will be given, nor will I be shipping what’s left of the product. I’m sorry. Can we all move on from this?”
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If you did that, 95% of us would take a moment, absorb, be a little annoyed, but ultimately we’d accept that and go away. Why is the 5% that won’t scaring you from addressing us? Just put an end to this, because you know we aren’t going to. Is this really how you want to spend the remainder of your career? Is this the image you want to present to your children about how to conduct yourself? I sure hope not, but you have yet to react in a way that seemed predictable/sane, so I’ll try not to be surprised when you continued to do nothing and hide behind your blog.
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I’m sorry for your loss – SIDS sucks. But ultimately, so do you. If you think otherwise, prove it.
Yeah, this is my stopping point. I’ve followed Cringely to PBS and then pleaded with him to keep going after PBS, but time to get off the train. I didn’t invest in MineServer, but I did write to him and ask him to address it because I’m tired of the forums getting filled up with people complaining. But his failure to do so makes me wonder why I bother. I shouldn’t. We shouldn’t. It’s time, people, to let Cringely go.
I agree with your general point, that he should man up and do something about the kickstarter.
But this specific post is not the place to bring it up. Nor was the previous post, an obituary. Next time he talks about random tech BS, go for it. but god, man, show some decency.
Before you argue that bob isn’t showing decency by ignoring your entreaties, STFU and man up yourself.
Here’s an interesting take on why Bob’s been silent on the Mineserver issue. The obituary post you mentioned would normally receive less than 20 comments, but thanks to Mineserver, it’s up to 64 and counting. The Mineserver complaints will significantly increase the number of comments, until such time as Bob passes on the torch, at a higher price than he would otherwise. So no matter the subject matter of the comments, we are all contributing to Bob’s retirement fund.
Your comment makes no sense since Bob stripped the site of all impression advertising long ago.
It’s not advertising, it’s followers and activity, besides it’s content and reputation, that all make the site valuable to sell. The lack of ads makes it more valuable. Leave it to the next owner to use, and apologize, for them.
As I understand it Bob doesn’t make any significant income directly from web traffic. He has described his primary income source as consluting (intentional misspelling), apparently trading on an ability to somehow convince his clients that his willingness to drop the names of famously successful tech leaders willy-nilly supersedes his long personal track record of project failures and outright abandonments-without-explanation (quick – someone name ONE of his multitude of publicly-announced projects that was successfully brought to market) as evidence of the value of his advice. Apparently enough of them fail in their due-diligence efforts that he is able to maintain a comfortable living, perhaps supplemented with income from the occasional abandoned Kickstarter project. Not the most impressive business model, but he seems to make it work for him.
Of course Bob makes no income from web traffic, with no ads. But with lots of activity and traffic he maintains the value of the Cringely brand. It’s sort of like the way Facebook, Twitter, even Google, started. Think of the sales of many popular companies that cost the buyers billions of dollars. If they had any income the earnings per share number would be too low to attract any interest. But with high traffic and zero income, eps is meaningless, so the company sells for billions.
Sorry, FAIL. The sympathy play was over a decade ago. We all have losses and we stop grieving after about a year.
BTW, if you read “the sociopath next door” the number one way to tell a sociopath is they use pity plays to manipulate. This article is nothing but an attempt to divert. Cringe miscalculated how angry his readers would get and he’s trying to weasel out.
You really should grow up and stop being such a gullible door mat.
That really is a disgraceful post Mark, not everything in the world is about that fucking mineserver….:
Actually I redact my comment. In my anger I decided to look up mineserver on KS. Cringely has handled the whole situation piss poorly! I still think Mark’s comment was in poor taste and agree with Thurstan’s sentiment, but the real villain here is Cringely. What the hell, man! Why are you saying nothing…:
The comment above under my name was not made by me. It was posted by someone else using my name. Is this really the level these mineserver people will sink too?
Posting comments pretending to be someone else on a post about infant mortality.
Absolutely disgraceful, that tells you all you need to know about this mineserver crap
@Mike Bellew I agree that we shouldn’t stoop to the level of impersonating others here, otherwise all credibility (or what little is left) will fly out the window. If only there was someone who could step in and say something and put an end to all of this…like, oh I dunno…Cringely?
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He used to read and participate in the comments fairly regularly until the MineServer fiasco happened. He has gone radio silent since, which is not just affecting the morale of the backers for his clealy failed KS (people who he clearly has little regard for), but the morale of all of his loyal supporters (people he SHOULD value if he has any sense).
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Why is he willing to flip you all the bird just to avoid us? Please feel free to contact him directly for a response. We all have yet to receive any response.
The impersonator tried to make you look as though you did your research and read the other comments as well. Bob is clearly in the wrong, but as I pointed out in another post, the extra Mineserver posts also make the articles seem to be way more popular than they would have been without them, so they’re contributing to Bob’s retirement fund.
Can someone really come on here and post as someone else who has already posted on the same article?
(Not Mike Bellew, just testing to see if the site really allows it).
Edit – looks like they can!
@Mike Bellew Heck, I bet someone could even make an account with the same name and image as Cringely’s, mimicking the one he used back when he was commenting, which would throw this whole comments section into a shit storm of uncertainty about who is who. Just seems like the obvious progression as people try to move this towards end game where ultimately no one wins…
That is an awful thing to say Mark. You lose a child you NEVER stop grieving.
@Dan Pritts: “But this specific post is not the place to bring it up. Nor was the previous post, an obituary.”
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Sympathy for the Devil, huh? I agree with Mark’s comment below: Bob is most likely simply trolling for sympathy in a lame attempt to swing reader opinion in the comment section and deflect attention from some of his supporters’ oh-so appropriate comments like “Take the gas pipe already and spare us any more of your ridiculous kvetching“.
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I mean really, Echo Dot as SIDS monitor? Preposterous when there are already products on the market much more suited/adaptable to the task that Bob, if anyone, should be aware of. And then there’s the just-a-bit-too-obvious “I’m too old to build one” Miner-Server-victim comment-bait.
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“but god, man, show some decency.”
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I don’t see that anyone here has failed to live up to the standards of decency set by the site owner. Low bar, perhaps, but when in Rome…
You might be on to something. Statements about age, fatigue, etc. have been appearing more and more often in Bob’s posts, of which the prominent ones are mostly obituaries of people from the era when he was at his most prominent as a public figure.
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I’m increasingly inclined to believe that those are related to an underlying depression which is probably at root of this entire fiasco.
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And once again I’m writing about a guy’s mental state in the comments of his blog. This is still seriously f*cking surreal.
I did a brief review of the Echo Dot development environment, and concluded it would not support this type of application out of the box. It would likely require hacking the Dot hardware to load custom code. Not impossible (probably), but it’s certainly more difficult than writing a standard Dot app the way Amazon expects you to.
I’d think that one of the various under-the-mattress HRM systems like, for instance, the one Withings makes would be a good platform to build this sort of a device off of. I’m no engineer, but it seems like those are sensitive and accurate enough that the hard part has been done, and the pattern detection / alarm triggering part would be relatively straightforward.
The question there is if the baby stops moving during that ‘heartbeat slowdown’ that Bob mentioned. If so, then it could be at least a partial solution. If not, however…if the body is not at complete rest during that slowing heartbeat…then it is not a solution at all and could lead to false security.
I’m guessing a combination of motion sensor and heartbeat sensor (or perhaps a very powerful microphone built into the motion sensing mat?) may work here…though it seems the heartbeat sensing is the key.
Ask Amazon to develop one? MASSIVE upside for them …?
I am so sorry for you loss, and how your post must be dredging up the memory of that horrible time.
From your post of 15 years ago:
“In the neonatal intensive care unit, where Chase spent his first few days, there are lots of monitors and they go off when they detect apnea — a cessation of breathing lasting for 20 seconds or more. Chase had a problem with apnea. Twice he turned blue right in my arms, simply forgetting to breathe.[…]
But to the medical establishment, apnea isn’t SIDS. If apnea is falling asleep at the wheel and driving off the road, SIDS is falling asleep at the wheel and driving into a bridge abutment. The doctors tell me leg shaking won’t end a SIDS attack and monitoring won’t detect one.”
Now you seem convinced that monitoring can detect a SIDS attack, and that a loud noise will end one. Has the technology of monitoring and counteracting a SIDS attack changed? Where can we read about the successful remediation of a SIDS attack? And I’d also like to examine the audio traces you refer to, but they don’t seem to be on the SIDS site.
I’m sorry to ask for such detail, but did Chase turn blue in your lap when he died? Maybe a monitor of skin tone/color is what would catch it?
Would a doximeter work, checking blood oxygen levels?
It would have to be wireless as a baby could get entangled in wires, and also large enough not to be swallowed while also fitting on a tiny newborn finger or toe.
So if I understand, what you’re trying to detect is a recognizable slowdown in heart rate.
I wonder if a thermal imaging camera could pick that up. Hm, a little searching tells me someone else has been thinking along those lines: https://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_workshops_2013/W13/papers/Gault_A_Fully_Automatic_2013_CVPR_paper.pdf
Here’s the problem I see. Is SIDS something that can be identified beforehand as a risk factor?
If every baby has a small one in a thousand chance, then are people really going to spend $50 to eliminate it?
And the chance is probably less than that, with things that are not SIDS likely being classified as that afterwards.
That issue of spending $50 to eliminate exactly one rare problem can be addressed two ways I can think of:
1) Make the device something you *rent* (or borrow) instead of buying, for much, much less than $50.
2) Make the device have other functions. To come back around to maybe using thermal imaging, a thermal imaging baby camera with computer vision processing could also detect, for example, a fever, and possibly many other conditions.
Perhaps the second one, though the cost is now much higher.
I think the first option wouldn’t work. Perhaps I am wrong, but I don’t think SIDS is something parents will worry about. It’s one thing if they go to the doctor, and he says your child is high risk of SIDS. Instead everyone is at very low risk.
If it’s cheap enough, then it’ll be something the insurers “worry about” instead of parents — if it makes financial sense, using one should get you a break on insurance (or failing to use one should get you a penalty).
I think every parent who has heard about it, worries about SIDS. And evidently monitors are being bought and used, that under matress one other commenters have mentioned costs a couple of hundred.
I can see how you could get something like this to work but to make it commercially available you would have to get past the FDA – we’re talking here about a device that, if it failed, could lead to the death of a human being. You would need to account for all the potential failures that could result in a SIDS event being missed – AC power failure, loss of Internet, Security issues, Device malfunction etc.
I would not connect anything like this to the Internet given the way interfaces get coded these days – can you imagine a hack that turned off every SIDS device, or set off the alarm for ever SIDS device in the US? I don’t want to rain on your parade but since one of my jobs is writing FDA 510(k) submissions, I’m pretty confident that this idea has a steep hill to climb.
>if it failed, could lead to the death of a human being.
Why does that make it FDA regulated? The device would not cause the death. It would just fail to prevent it.
@MikeN – https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=868&showFR=1&subpartNode=21:8.0.1.1.21.3
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FDA guidance for respiratory monitoring equipment
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Mark might be sleazy but he knows better than to mess with the feds
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Sproutling (recently aquired by Matel) makes a heart-rate wearable for infants. It looks like this unofficially for SIDS (no FDA approval).
Maybe start a Kickstarter to get the app built.
BOB!
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For the love of Christ, will you tell these people that your project has failed?!
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You’ve complained before that crowdsourcing replaces one source of money with hundreds. It also replaces one angry investor a hundredfold.
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You don’t have to bend and scrape but every goddamned day you let this go makes it even harder for everyone to stand down. You have your kids’ names attached to the words “fraud,” “crook” and “conman.”
>>You have your kids’ names attached to the words “fraud,” “crook” and “conman.”
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That’s exactly right but they’re all pseudonyms just like Bob (if they even exist at all – with RXC/MS who knows what the truth is?) Assuming they do exist, he’s taught them the valuable lesson that everything is free for the taking – all you need is a willingness to lie and a complete lack of conscience. Want money? Promise a new product, hype it up real good and drop all the famous names in the industry you can think of, collect money to develop it, then drop the mic and walk away. Want to avoid responsibility? Use a fake name. Want a PhD? Claim you have one from Stanford and they won’t do anything to stop you:
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“I don’t know what the University can do,” Chaffee said. “I suppose the University could get a cease and desist order, but I think that would be a lot more trouble than it’s worth. There are a lot of cases out there of people claiming a closer affiliation with Stanford than they actually have His is an extreme form.”
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It may not be official, but RXC/MS has shown that he’s “done the work necessary to earn” an advanced degree in fraudulent behavior. If STANFORD won’t protect their own reputation, why should Cringe or his pseudo-kids worry about theirs?
My Garmin Vivosmart HR can be “programmed” at specific heart rate to send a notice to my smart phone or any bluetooth device. Isn’t it likely that Garmin could develop the specific app that would detect the appropriate heart rate sequence which send a notice to a loud smart phone or bluetooth loudspeaker in/at the crib?
Hi Bob. I see a lot of focus on using sound for hearbeat detection.
How about using image processing instead?
Video magnification shown at SIGGRAPH 2012 seems promising: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/
There was even an academic attempt at putting it in an android app form:
– https://github.com/PChambino/pulse
– http://p.chambino.com/dissertation/
Hello, do you allow guest posting on cringely.com ? 🙂 Please let me know on my email
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