Babies can be petulant little creatures at times. One minute, they’re happy as the proverbial pig in mud, the next minute they’re screaming at the top of their lungs for no particular reason. It’s OK if you can discover the cause straight away…but when nothing seems to soothe, it can be a tad stressful. Enter the Why Cry Baby Analyzer - a machine that apparently lets you know within 20 seconds why your youngster is screaming at the top of their tiny lungs.
It sounds too good to be true, but this machine supposedly tells you whether your baby’s cries mean they are stressed, hungry, bored, annoyed or tired via a LCD screen. The unit also displays the temperature and humidity of the room and is battery operated.
The adjustable Velcro strap means you can take it just about anywhere and at just 0.5 pounds, with dimension of 2 x 6.3 x 2 inches, it is small and light enough to keep in your diaper bag. It uses 4 AA batteries which are included, as is a symptoms chart and guide on baby’s development.
According to the Why Cry website, the machine is capable of analyzing crying power, frequencies, correlation with established patterns and the length of crying intervals. It claims the machine is clinically certified and that a survey (participant numbers are not provided) of new parents found the machine to be 98% reliable. It also mentions the machine won the G.a.l.a.c.t.i.c.a 2001 silver medal, awarded by the International Trade Fair of Inventions and new patents. Now, I did try to find information about the G.a.l.a.c.t.i.c.a awards and you guessed it – I found pages and pages and pages of information about Battlestar Galactica! So, I can’t verify exactly what the award is, nor what it was won for.
If the information on the website started to ring a few alarm balls, I was also bothered by the fact that the Why Cry Baby Analyzer may give a false reading from other noises in the room. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly sure that a baby doesn’t discriminate where, when and why they start crying…so if the room is noisy and you get a false reading you might find yourself feeding your baby when all they want to do is go to sleep.
Additionally, many of the symptoms of crying can be simply cured by a cuddle. If a baby is bored, stressed or annoyed, just picking them up and soothing should help to stop the tears. However, for parents at the end of their emotional tether, the Why Cry may help a little in those early months of baby’s life.
This gadget reminds me of The Simpsons episode where Homer’s brother makes a baby crying gadget to analyze baby Maggie’s cries…however similar, it’s hard to imagine the makers of the Why Cry Baby machine will manage to make their fortune from this gadget.
The Why Cry Baby is available from Think Geek and retails for USD $100. For that kind of money, I would buy a room thermometer for the nursery and trust your natural parenting instincts instead of a machine.
Via Like Cool.