Please, please, do not use something like this as the only method of monitoring a child’s safety. This sort of thing has given me honest to god nightmares.
My day job is managing development and infrastructure of internet connected cameras, with motion detection, notifications, and all the rest of it. Every now and again someone new will start on the marketing team and put together something about using them as baby monitors, swiftly followed by the engineering team descending on them to explain there’s no way we can guarantee sufficient reliability for something where the worst case failure mode is someone’s baby dying.
If you’re going to insist on something like this you need to be absolutely sure that you have sufficient monitoring in place. If it loses video from the camera, it needs to alert. If it loses its network connection, it needs to alert. If whatever is meant to be receiving alerts doesn’t receive a heartbeat from the camera, it needs to alert. In all those cases that alert needs to be obnoxious as hell, and guaranteed to fire.
And the machine learning just needs to go away, unless somehow you’ve obtained video of every way in which a child can end up seriously injured, from multiple angles, with which to train it.
I've been an SRE before, and have kids. I don't think there's any real expectation that a baby monitor is a reliable alerting system that can be depended on. There are definitely people in the thread who believe that's the case, and it also looks like some products are built to those high standards, it's not legally required, and I don't think it's even desirable.
I don't hold the people who care for my children to the standards that you would hold a video camera (IE, they're allowed to go to the bathroom with the door closed without alerting) so I can't see why I would expect it of the technology that approximated it.
I agree with the sentiment here; there seems to be an impression that a baby monitor is a safety device. I'm not sure it is.
We use a baby monitor during naps and overnight. It's a good way to relay any noises and reassure us he's ok, but you can't really see enough detail on an overhead camera to see they're breathing or anything like that. It failed a few nights ago, and we woke up when we heard the crying through the couple of doors. (If we were awake, downstairs and it failed, we would have tried to fix it pretty quick, but we have the fairly basic backup strategy of going to sit upstairs with him.)
A baby monitor is to detect if a baby is crying not if a baby is dying. It seems like your exaggerating the user need (system engineer in HW+ SW and father of 3 here). Most use cases for baby monitors are “im relatively nearby, but want to hear if the kiddo’s waking up”.
This exactly. My baby bro was a preemie with potential heart issues (he grew up fine), but he had a proper heart monitor connected with sticky leads 24x7 for the couple of months. It had a really loud siren and decent battery built in.
When you actually need health monitoring, you don't trust a baby monitor.
I don't even know anyone who uses a baby monitor. I think we can get by. If someone relies on one to the exclusion of actually checking on their child from time to time, the failure of the monitor is probably the least of risks.
I know we were gifted one, and it didn't ever get used.
When the baby was brought home he shared the bedroom with the pair of us, and it was immediately obvious if he was crying.
Later when he moved to sleeping in his own room we could still easily hear the noise of crying, as the room was immediately adjacent to our own, and we left the doors open.
I remember we setup a routine at some point where one of us would sleep in his room with him, leaving the other one free to sleep through the whole night.
Maybe if you live in a mansion, and you can't hear a baby crying from the other wing it might be necessary. But most of the parents I know have always been close enough to hear crying just with their ears. (Although I know there certainly are days, especially early on, where you'll hear but be half-asleep and not really do anything!)
Around here we have a custom of letting your kid have a nap in the baby wagon outdoors, even in winter. I guess people started using baby monitors for that by now. When I was small, mum just left a window a bit open (1970-ish Sweden).
This is even done at daycare down to -15 degrees C. However they do have someone present next to the kids at most times.
There are lots of stories of swedish people going to USA and getting arrested for leaving their kid without supervision outside while being 5 meters away inside a store for five minutes. We are used to a bit more relaxed way of parenting I guess :-)
I'm in Finland (although not Finnish), and we did the same thing. Putting the pram on the balcony, while the child was asleep. We'd usually leave the door partway open so we could hear if he cried.
But to be honest once he was having a nap he was generally predictable, and quiet. Especially the lunchtime naps after food - we knew he'd be absolutely fine asleep for 90 minutes and then he'd probably wake up. On a long day he'd sleep for two hours, but that didn't happen so often.
Interesting reading for people in other parts of the world:
Its not necessarily about missing out the crying or not, its about hearing it sooner rather than later. You speak of "the baby". If you got two children, you don't want the youngest crying to wake up the oldest (or vice versa). You really don't want a toddler with a lack of sleep. Its causing temper tantrums extraordinaire. Thus far, I got lucky with ours. When she sleeps, she's gone in la-la land, her brother crying be damned. Or so it seems.
True. As my coworker, who has 3 kids of her own, always says, if they're going to stop breathing, its not like its something youre going to hear. They could be in a crib in your bedroom at night, and you'd never know. The monitor is just to see whats going on, are they even sleeping yet, who threw their stuffed animal out, etc...
The possibility of failure is maybe a good reason to consider not selling this as a product for fear of lawsuits because if you have millions of these out there what happens when one fails and a baby dies of SIDS. However I suspect baby monitor companies have figured out a trivial legal or technical solution to this issue and I really doubt baby monitors are engineered to the standards of a life saving medical device.
Even if you get the perfect training data, the state-of-the art neural networks will not be 100% reliable. Convolutional neural networks work by recursively recognizing shapes. In theory, the first layer should match the picture on something like this and conclude "it's probably an eye":
o o X o o
o X X X o
o X X X o
o o X o o
(above, "X" denotes low relative brightness, "o" denotes high relative brightness).
The next convolutional layer is supposed to see something like this and conclude it's a face:
(eye) (not a bumper) (eye)
(not a door) (nose) (not a wheel)
(not a shovel) (mouth) (not a window)
That's in theory. In practice, each input to the second layer will be a vector of probabilities. Like 90% eye, 80% wheel, 1% door. The output will also look like a vector of probabilities, and the layer is supposed to figure out a linear formula matching inputs to outputs that results in the best statistical outcome. So it can very easily come up with kernels like this:
* A: (an eye or a wheel) and maybe a bumper to the right of it
* B: (an eye or a wheel) and maybe a bumper to the left of it
* C: (two wheels) side-by-side
In this case, the baby face will be encoded as A together with B and definitely not C. Because each next level produces a linear combination of the previous level's outputs, the "or a wheel" parts will get nicely canceled out as long as the "2 wheels" kernel input is a low value, concluding that it's a face with a confidence of 99%. Until the light falls from a different angle and the baby holds a round lego brick near their face, suddenly yielding 80% confidence that it's a car.
Drawing parallels to organic life, neural networks are good at replicating inborn instincts. Like animals instantly recognizing predators, food or poisonous plants. But they are still far away from having a situational awareness needed to make judgement calls in most real-world situations.
I agree. I feel like the other people replying to this comment is misunderstanding the intention of having a baby monitor and the state of a mind a new parent is in.
I still remember the panic that set in when the cheaper camera loss signal and didn't notify us. The good monitor made a loud beeping sound if it's losing connection or is low on battery. It's a peace of mind knowing there are safe guards when the technology fails you.
I don't expect a baby monitor to keep track of the child's health status, but I do expect it to work reliably as digital link to the room.
> If it loses video from the camera, it needs to alert. If it loses its network connection, it needs to alert. If whatever is meant to be receiving alerts doesn’t receive a heartbeat from the camera, it needs to alert. In all those cases that alert needs to be obnoxious as hell, and guaranteed to fire.
An exercise to think about this is the baby monitor should DEFAULT to the alarm state. Now, what conditions have to be met to turn the damn alarm off.
I guess the disconnect is between "what is the monitor used for" vs "what can a baby monitor producer be sued for". Their worst case is the worst possible litigious customer.
Although I don't get why the engineers argue that one rather than lawyers. It's a disclaimer / liability issue, not a technical one. We know the tech will fail at some point.
My day job is managing development and infrastructure of internet connected cameras, with motion detection, notifications, and all the rest of it. Every now and again someone new will start on the marketing team and put together something about using them as baby monitors, swiftly followed by the engineering team descending on them to explain there’s no way we can guarantee sufficient reliability for something where the worst case failure mode is someone’s baby dying.
If you’re going to insist on something like this you need to be absolutely sure that you have sufficient monitoring in place. If it loses video from the camera, it needs to alert. If it loses its network connection, it needs to alert. If whatever is meant to be receiving alerts doesn’t receive a heartbeat from the camera, it needs to alert. In all those cases that alert needs to be obnoxious as hell, and guaranteed to fire.
And the machine learning just needs to go away, unless somehow you’ve obtained video of every way in which a child can end up seriously injured, from multiple angles, with which to train it.