Anyone who’s ever slept through a morning’s alarm can tell you that sounds, even loud piercing ones, don’t always wake a person out of a deep sleep. Similarly, hearing a baby cry on the other side of the monitor might not always wake a parent up in the middle of the night. So what’s the solution? This haptic baby monitor created by [Guy Dupont] certainly looks like it has some promise.
[Guy] picked up a fairly standard baby monitor from VTech and popped it open to see how he could tie a vibration motor into the original circuitry. He originally thought he’d have to do some signal processing magic to figure out the amplitude of the audio, but then he realized that the five LEDs on the front of the unit that light up to indicate the audio level were already doing the hard work for him.
![](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/hapticmonitor_detail.jpg?w=400)
So he wired each of the LEDs up to the pins of a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 microcontroller, and wrote some code that would poll their status a few hundred times per second. Dividing the total number of LEDs by the count of how many are currently illuminated gives him a nice average that he can use to set the intensity of the vibration motor that he’s built into a stretchy armband.
For extra points, [Guy] is also using the Bluetooth capability of the XIAO to provide a rudimentary configuration service — just connect up to the MCU with a Bluetooth serial application on your computer or phone, and fire off a value between 0 and 10 to augment the motor’s intensity. There’s also a BLE characteristic which can be read from a client device to determine the currently detected audio amplitude, which could be used to chart how well the baby is sleeping over time. Alternately, as demonstrated at the end of the video, you could use it to play Flappy Bird.
It’s an elegant modification that could potentially hold promise for parent’s who need a bit of extra help keeping tabs on their miniature humans. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen hackers try to improve upon the classic baby monitor, but this is arguably the most approachable attempt we’ve seen to date.
He could avoid the possibility of the motor failing, and have the wrist strap a voltage shock instead.
B^)
This was the original suggestion from our friends TBH : )
not to be a nay sayer but years back when my son was a baby we used this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Summer-Infant-Babble-Wearable-Monitor/dp/B01ETNV034
pretty much the same but with less of a risk of failing and possibly cheaper…
Yes I would definitely trust a real product more than my hack! Definitely more of an experiment than anything. However, I did look to see what was already on the market before I started and was surprised at how few of them are out there. This one did not even pop up! It appears to be discontinued.
But now I want to go digging and see if it failed because the concept is actually a bad one lol
as a parent i went on and purchased all sort of monitors. sound, infrared, sensors, you name it. by the half of the year mark only one of them was still on – the summer one. The best thing about it is that unlike the standard monitors you do not have to look at it. strap it on your hand and do the vacuuming – for all you know if the baby wakes up you will feel it.
the main downside as far as i remember is that you have to remember to place it back on the station to recharge as the battery will not last for very long – i suspect that may have had something to do with it going off the market.
either that or it was too cheap and people assumed cheap = bad. to be honest my initial purchase was only because i was intrigued by the idea AND it was incredibly cheap.
https://www.motherandbaby.co.uk/reviews/baby-monitors/summer-infant-babble-band-wearable-baby-monitor/
i think i got it in the shop on some sale and it was half the price on this site.
The sound of a baby crying anywhere has always been like somebody sending bursts of electricity through my head. Quite a while ago I read an article that said males tend to be much more affected by the sound, supposedly due to it being an alarm signal from our ancient history. Not sure if that is true or not, but it does seem to me that men react more irritably to that crying than women do, and I don’t believe that’s necessarily due to women being more used to it.
As I understand it, mothers are more attuned to the cry of _their_ baby/child.
I am not saying it is something other than what is gained from experience.
I have experienced it often in a room with maybe 20 or more children playing and several dozen adults in conversation. One child screams in protest or pain, followed by a brief silence of the adults. In that moment, one mother recognized that it is her child and the rest of rest of the mothers resume their conversations.
My kiddos are within tangible reach of graduating high school at this point, but I”ve earned my stripes with 4 kids.
If there is little or nothing out there, keep the project alive! There are plenty of deaf people out there who could use this kind of help. If you haven’t seen it, check out the excellent (tho fictional) movie CODA (Child of Deaf Adults).
Also, as you stated, there are many who are hard to wake… More and more are finding themselves in a single parent household – and that means sheer exhaustion. Also, more and more people are being diagnosed with issues such as sleep apnea. It’s no fun being all kitted out and wondering if you’ve heard something!
Even with two parents & 1 child, there is no reason for BOTH parents to be woken… Or maybe one needs to go to the office and the other takes care of the baby at night. So many scenarios.
Also, there are a lot of watches with “haptic feedback” used for all different reasons. I wear a watch with haptic feedback so i can get up without waking the Mrs – who does not take kindly to being woken up before HER alarm goes off! 😜. Happy wife, happy life! In all seriousness though, my wife works the graveyard shift and i don’t.
So, lots of reasons why people use haptic feedback!
“Happy wife, happy life”
“If you want to be happy for the rest of your life”
😜
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z4TOR7856d4