Children

Edison-powered Mimo Baby Monitor ushers in the Internet of Things

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The Mimo Baby Monitor includes onesies stuffed with sensors, a docking station and a smartphone app
The Mimo Baby Monitor includes onesies stuffed with sensors, a docking station and a smartphone app
Edison-enabled smart milk bottle warmer as featured in Intel's CES 2014 keynote
Mimo Baby Monitor's smartphone app interface
The lilypad station also doubles as a charger
Edison-enabled smart coffee mugs, as featured in Intel's CES 2014 keynote
The smart turtle resting on the lilypad station after job well done
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The Mimo Baby Monitor puts anxious parents at ease by providing them with a constant stream of data about their little sweetheart. The sensors embedded in an infant bodysuite, called the Kimono, monitor the baby’s respiration. The data is passed on to a small turtle-shaped gizmo, nested in the Kimono, which in turn measures skin temperature, body position and the activity pattern. All this information is then relayed via low-power bluetooth to a Wi-Fi enabled docking station so that parents can access all the details via their smartphones.

While the Mimo Baby Monitor is not the first offering of its kind, it is the first in what is likely to become an onslaught of wearable electronics products featuring the freshly-announced Edison chip – more on that later.

The smartphone app, available both for iOS and Android, enables parents to keep track of their baby’s vitals in real time while also giving them a handy analytics-style overview of the breathing and sleep patterns over time. The Lilypad station, sitting next to the crib, has a built-in microphone so that moms and dads can listen to baby sounds via the smartphone app. Another feature lets them set alarms and get notified about any significant changes in the readings.

While these functions already make Mimo worth considering, the feature range is likely to be extended pretty soon to include all the possible hardware synergies resulting from incorporating Edison. About a month before its keynote at CES 2014, Intel approached Rest Devices, the company behind Mimo, with a partnership proposal which resulted in the start-up’s engineers incorporating the revolutionary chip into their design just in time for presentation at the show.

Intel's Edison is a self-contained, Linux-based computer the size of an SD card. It packs a low-power, dual-core 22nm 400MHz Intel Quark processor, integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It is a flexible platform capable of running different types of downloadable applications. Put all this together with the mind-blowing form factor and the fact that Edison chips are able to communicate with each other and trigger actions remotely (as all computers do) and the advent of the Internet of Things suddenly seems very near.

The scenario presented during Intel’s keynote is simple yet convincing at the same time. As soon as the smart little turtle notices the baby has woken up, it sends a signal to another Edison-enabled device, the Mimo Bottle Warmer. The parents receive their nudge via the smartphone app, and all they have to do to feed their baby is pick up an already warmed-up milk bottle. Simple.

Edison-enabled smart coffee mugs, as featured in Intel's CES 2014 keynote

Curiously, for the sake of the presentation, Intel also replaced the smartphone app interface with an Edison-enabled coffee mug displaying key real-time information about the baby on its side. While this part of the presentation was a little bit over the top, it does drive the point across in terms of what will ensue if Edison is unleashed upon millions of innovators just waiting to make everything smart.

As Rest Devices assure on its blog, other devices will soon join the Mimo Baby Monitor and the Mimo Bottle Warmer, forming an entire ecosystem of smart baby care products called Nursery 2.0. Meanwhile, parents should already be able to buy a Mimo starter pack at US$199, including three Kimonos, one turtle and one docking station.

Sources: mimo, Intel

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7 comments
Casey Lewiston
This is great! Actually checking on or interacting with your own child is exhausting, I've always wanted my phone to do it for me.
Joel Detrow
Whoa...this is when it begins. When vital signs of thousands of people are monitored almost every moment of every day, from birth to death, and these records compiled into a database upon which statistical analysis can tell us things we never would have guessed.
Grunchy
No Blackberry app! Whaaaat...
Jeremy Wing
Great idea for people with a high risk of SIDS. I can see it saving lives.
Harry van Trotsenburg
And what about the influence of Bluetooth / Wifi energy on the baby? There is already a lot information about the influence on plants see for instance : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22938144
No way I would do this to my child.
Electro-koh Hao
it will be better if the data can be transfer to the doctors.
Amber White
This is actually really nice way of interacting with the kids. It also supports the concept of internet of things which is going to be the future for the next 3 years at least.