Having worked as a father with an infant for over three months I have been pondering various areas where modern technology could work in my favor to reduce some of the labor of handling a child. Since the average budget for a baby is unlimited given that other people are buying items off of a registry I don’t see why the makers of baby products don’t work on some of the challenges that I have faced. Below are some product ideas that I would be happy to talk to any private investor about turning into a large enterprise.
Problem area 1 - Feeding
The breast pump has gone through significant breakthroughs in the past century moving from manual extraction to an automated portable systematic way of pulling milk out of mothers. The good thing is that us fathers have bottles full of milk to feed our hungry children. The bad thing is that we have to sit and hold the baby while they suck down the milk and the bottle itself isn’t nearly as good as the breast. The breast doesn’t have any air in it while both the standard bottle and the ones where you put bags in the bottom both have air in them. Air means burps and milk spilling all over the place. That isn’t to say that burping isn’t needed for breast feedings. Since I can’t feed during the breast feedings I tend to get put onto burping duty. Unfortunately the burp cloth on the shoulder technique requires a lot of dexterity when switching shoulders and the burp cloth, which is really an old style diaper, tends to slip all over my shoulder and not cover the actual area where the infant burps, down my back. So here are some solutions to these feeding problems…
Bottle holder/feeder: They managed to build the automated feeder for Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and that was back in the 1920s. A robotic arm using a visual sensor and feedback from the bottle that could properly hold the bottle in the baby’s mouth while they are seated in the perfect feeding position, strapped into a harness, would allow me to happily talk to the baby and keep my shoulder from getting sore scrunched into a ball. The baby would also be treated to the perfection of the perfect hold.
Hold it yourself long thin bottle: I noticed that the reason why Madeline doesn’t hold her bottles herself at three months is that the bottle is far too wide for her hands. When she was given a thin bottle, which is what formula samples come in, she was both able to put her hands around the bottle and keep it stuck in her mouth for an hour as we walked through Boston. A long thin bottle designed for the baby to hold the sides would allow me to be hands free during the feeding. I would imagine it could even be optimized to avoid air by looking like and working mainly like a syringe.
Electric bottle: If the pump can automate getting the milk out of the mother then the bottle should be able to automate getting the milk into the baby properly. The pump uses electricity to get the milk out while the bottle relies on air. The plastic bag in bottle solutions seem to have the best answer to the no air problem but they tend to get air into them anyways. Using a second hole and a pump to take the air out of the bottle (but not the liquid) would be a better bottle system.
Breast nipple: Breasts distribute milk through lots of little ducts and not one little hole. Why not a nipple that does the same. It would output milk more like a sponge with many small holes rather than one big one. That way it is harder for the air to flow back into the holes to put air into the bottle.
Burp collars: Since burp cloths are always sliding everywhere when you put a baby on your shoulder and need to be switched back and forth, a collar that provides spit-up milk catching optimization that can be worn during burping would be ideal. The collar would cover the shoulder and upper back areas and be easy to put on quickly when burping.
Problem area 2 - Entertainment
Babies like to be entertained and suffer from the unfortunate condition that they can’t use a remote control or even sit-up in bed. So the entertainment needs to be brought to them. Some progress has been made by the Fisher-Price corporation with bouncy seats that have vibrators in them and swings that move the baby around but these don’t seem to do the trick most of the time and the music that they play is monotonous and annoying to adults. Mobiles and play gyms are good but they require placing the baby in the right spot to see or play with them so when the baby is lying on the bed or in their seat they aren’t readily available. Plus the mobiles need to move to make the baby stimulated. Here are some solutions…
Exchangable music in toys using flash ram: Basically if the makers of toys that play music could just include an MP3 player in them instead of the annoying canned music then we could use a USB cable or a 8MB Flash RAM card to update the music. Otherwise it feels like we are trapped like an FAO Schwartz employee listening to music that can drive us into a psychotic state.
Ceiling projector or television: Babies can’t sit up. They stare at the ceiling most of the time and unlike the rest of the room, there is nothing to see on the ceiling but the lights and white paint. To improve the ceiling experience a projector mounted on the floor would should something stimulating, like the visualizations from Windows Media Player, Barney (hopefully getting eaten by rodents), or images of mom and dad saying important phrases. Using crystals their child can bring key advice back once the child leaves the mother planet and goes into their fortress of solitude on the North Pole.
Mobile mobiles: Mobiles are great but they need to be mounted from the ceiling. But if the mobile was hung from a little, but heavy remote control car, like an RV that could drive around the room to wherever the baby was it would allow them to be entertained anywhere. The mobile could then automatically be moved and jostled in time to music or based on feedback from the baby.
Mobile fishing rod: I already built one of these. It is like those fishing rods for cats when you drag a mouse around except it holds the mobile over the head of the baby and allows me to bob it up and down in synch with Techno music.
Humanoid robot: This would have obvious uses in holding and calming the baby without causing too much long-term emotional damage. It also would prepare the child for the next century, The Age of Intelligent Machines, when robots like Arnold Schwarzenegger will control the world.
Car seat train ride: The car seat is a safe place and Madeline can be calmed down often by swinging it around right after she is put begrudgingly into it. Some people don’t have my extreme upper body physique that allows me to swing around the car seat. What Madeline appears to want is a small indoor Disney style roller coaster that the car seat can be placed on that can ride her at a reasonable velocity up and down hills and with some turbulence. The seat is safe and everyone loves indoor train sets. It could require a lot of power but given that they already have electric cars this shouldn’t be too tough to power.
Problem area 3 – Changing and strolling
When moving about with a baby in a stroller or baby carrier a number of things can go wrong. One of them is that the baby needs to be changed and can leak gross baby refuse all over. Knowing that a change is needed could help reduce leakage since a quick change might catch a leak before it causes too much damage. Unfortunately babies enjoy wallowing in their own urine or feces. They only cry when bored or hungry so they are unlikely to warn that a diaper needs changing. The second issue for leakage is dealing with the problem that diapers don’t actually contain what I like to refer to as explosive diarrhea. After cleaning-up the baby, which has adequate technology short of the humanoid robot to do it for me, dressing the baby is a whole other story. Some solutions…
Diaper nano-technology warning system: Batteries have been providing little meters to determine their level of charge for a number of years now. They include these little chemical meters that don’t usually work until you try to puncture them with your fingernails and even then you can’t figure out whether they have a charge in them or not. Well if we can make battery testers then we can make diaper moisture testers. People working on the problems of moisture detection in buildings and construction are already placing small nano-tech sensors into walls to detect the moisture in them in order to alert building maintenance staff. Every bottle of Pepsi may have an RFID tag in it soon. So how about an active RFID tag inside of each diaper to measure the level of moisture and potentially other things. It could be polled by a monitor and would sound an alarm if the monitor registered that a diaper needed to be changed.
Diapers that don’t leak: Anyone with a baby knows that despite advertisements that you can pour a cup of water into a diaper that this isn’t good enough. A better advertisement would be if someone were to put eight carrots into a Cuisinart with peanut butter and then shot the resulting beverage out of a cannon at the diaper at close range. If the diaper showed no leakage then I would buy a container truck full of them. The folks who are doing aerodynamic optimization for the car companies should take a look at the physics of the baby projectile poop and redesign the diaper folds at the edges to contain it.
Clothing that’s easier to put on the arms (arm snaps): Maybe I am incompetent but I find it hard to put baby clothing on. The snaps are helpful but I generally get stuck for a long time trying to get the arms through the little holes. The folks at MIT doing knot theory should be able to create a surface that can be easily snapped together to avoid the dreaded pulling through of the arms.
Smart light blocker: When in a stroller the direct sun tends to get into Madeline’s face. We don’t like this because we were told that we would go blind if we stared at the sun. Madeline likes to stare at the sun and we would prefer to not have her go blind. We also don’t want to have her get sunburned. The problem with our stroller set-up is that the rain cover doesn’t shield the sun well. What I’d prefer was an arm that held a parasol that moved it automatically to being between the baby and the sun. If that isn’t possible then some other automation to block the sun would also work fine.
While this list is not likely to be set-up as SBIR challenge grants from the US Government I’m always in the market for some good products. Unfortunately soon all of these will be obsolete since Madeline is rapidly outgrowing the need for all of these. But plenty of new customers are born every day.
