This revolutionary crib aims to calm crying babies and lull them back to sleep in mere minutes. Called Snoo, the crib is the result of collaboration between Swiss designer Yves Béhar and pediatrician and Happiest Baby on the Block author Harvey Karp.
Snoo senses your baby’s distressed cries and uses gentle rocking and soothing noises to help them go back to sleep. Parents can also use a mobile app to monitor and control the crib.
“I’ve now had four children, the youngest only a few months old, so when I met Harvey about 5 years ago we had plenty to discuss,” Béhar tells Architectural Digest. “I was already using his world-renowned Happiest Baby on the Block method with my own children, but then he had an even bigger idea. The question that Dr. Karp and I sought to answer was, ‘Is there a way to utilize robotic technology, AI, and design to perfect this method, every time, for any baby?’”
Watch Snoo at work in this video:
Karp points out to Wired that parents today don’t get as much support as parents in previous generations. “Parents today face the myth of the nuclear family,” he says. “We like to think a husband and wife get together and raise a child, but that never has happened throughout history.
“Today if you have a nanny, you’re cush. But years ago, people had several nannies, and they were called your grandma, your neighbor, your neighbor’s daughter, and so on.”
With Snoo, Karp and Béhar hope to provide the extra help that parents would have gotten from another caregiver.
Already, some have raised concerns about using a robot crib. Go to the next page to read more.
Snoo, which sells for $1,160, seems to be the perfect solution for fatigued parents who struggle with balancing the demands of everyday life with parenting, but already, some have spoken out against the device.
Are robot cribs the future? Some valid concerns
“This device is not empowering or educating parents, and it’s not helping with the crucial bonding process during the first few weeks and months of being a parent,” parenting expert Jen Hamilton told news.com.au. “When babies are little, crying is nature’s way of helping with that bonding process. It’s nature’s way of getting needs met, and what worries me is that this bassinet will hinder the parents’ development of maternal and paternal instincts.”
Child psychologist Wendy Middlemiss tells Wired that the key to using devices like Snoo is not relying on the robot to do all the work. “A lack of interaction between the parent and child would not be healthy,” she explains. “But if it’s used for that purpose of having a baby transition back to sleep when they’re not fully awake, when they haven’t signaled for attention, that’s less of a risk.”
READ: What’s a common baby sleeping pattern?
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