It was around the time I saw a smart contraction monitor stuck to a pregnant lady’s abdomen in the middle of the convention floor that it hit me. This show is going to have way more nifty tech than must-have gear.
The monitor is made by a company in San Francisco called Bloomlife, whose eponymous product sticks to a pregnant mother and, just as you’d expect from the tech industry these days, uses sensors to tell her something about her body. In this case, it monitors contractions and helps a mother-to-be track contractions, both in an active labor and a false one.
Bloomlife doesn’t yet have the FDA certification of a medical device.
It’s the latest example of the typical tech industry approach: Take an old product (in this case, the bulky monitors strapped on a mother’s body in the hospital), make it cheaper and more portable by relying on smaller sensors, and then connect it to an app.
If that’s not so much your game, across the way at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a kid’s smart alarm clock. A day later, I saw smart thermometers, smart strollers and smart fertility trackers.
It’s easy to dismiss many of these products as just another smart fill-in-the-blank. It was hard for me not to scoff, «Really? We need an app to tell a woman when she’s in labor? My wife could tell just fine without it. »
Here’s the thing: They all make sense if you’re a techie. But while many of them pass the «oh, that’s clever» test, few promise to upend the way I’m parenting today.
As much as I’d like to convince myself otherwise, a normal thermometer is just fine.
