Weird Commerce: Raybaby Raises the Baby Monitoring Bar

Being a parent in general is a tough job. From trying to balance each child’s activities along with their own lives, parents can be spread too thin.

One company looking to improve the lives of parents and their newborns is Ray, with its non-touch baby wellness monitor, Raybaby. With this new system in place, parents can install the monitor near the baby’s crib and download an app to help with the intricacies of baby’s health as they develop. Raybaby has embedded radar technology to help detect changes in the baby’s breathing and sleeping patterns.

PYMNTS spoke with Ray’s cofounder and CEO, Ranjana Nair, who shared how the concept for Raybaby was developed and why it’s so important to monitor babies’ breathing to track wellness.

Nair said, “The idea for Raybaby came after visiting a friend’s baby in a NICU facility, where we saw that the respiration rate was still tracked by placing a hand on the baby’s chest or cumbersome chest bands that compromise accuracy and comfort. In today’s technologically advanced society, we thought there had to be a better way to measure the most important vital sign used to predict and monitor illnesses in babies. Raybaby was developed as a device to bring peace of mind to parents. Ray IoT started with researching the importance of respiration rate as a vital sign and its usefulness in diagnosing various medical conditions. We interviewed doctors and worked with top hardware engineers to come up with a safe device that tracks with precision of 98 percent. Then, we built in the intelligence to make use of the data collected and help parents.”

The Raybaby product helps put parents at ease knowing their baby is being monitored at all times. This is useful because it allows for peace of mind while doing daily activities, a restful night’s sleep and a more detailed account of the baby’s activities for doctor visits. While baby monitoring is the primary focus right now, the company is keeping an eye toward the future via adapting the platform to detect and predict illnesses in other life stages.

Nair said, “A doctor uses four main vitals to diagnose diseases. One of the main vitals is respiration rate. They use this vital to predict heart attacks, epileptic attacks, allergy attacks, sleep issues and any life-threatening events. Our plan is to make other devices that can be used while sleeping. We’d like to expand on our existing algorithms around respiration rate to be able to predict heart attack, help with senior care, help diagnose sleep apnea. Our firmware will remain the same.”

The radar technology available in the Raybaby product is likely to become an essential facet of the IoT industry. With the ability to detect any small changes, the possibilities are endless. When we discussed the future of Raybaby, Nair shared the company’s main objectives and when parents will be able to get their hands on one of these.

“Our first objective was to create a non-wearable to track baby vitals,” Nair said. “We strongly sent a message that battery-operated devices on a baby are not safe or accurate. Our crowdfunding campaign was successfully funded, as we saw more than 700 parents back Raybaby in a span of five days. Our second objective will be to make a smart baby monitor. Just imagine Raybaby being able to automatically adjust the thermostat in your home to suit your baby’s sleep. There will be 24 billion Internet-connected devices installed on earth by 2020. That is more than four devices for every human on earth. We want to connect Raybaby to various IoT platforms in the future. In terms of the product, we will be retail-ready by September. Our units will also start shipping to backers then. We are gearing up for the holiday season by the end of the year.”

To donate to Raybaby before it hits shelves, check out its Kickstarter here.