11 ms·

Show HN: Baby Buddy

172 points by cdubzzz 9y ago

roryisok 9y ago
cool app, but in my limited experience with newborns, there just isn't enough time to input data into a system like this to get the cool reports.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Sample size of one, but my wife and all of her female friends used an iOS app called "Glow" to track the same data as this app (religiously logging after each feeding, nap, and diaper change). Apps like this are extremely helpful to identify deviations from the norm that could be indicitive of a problem the child is having. EDIT: Removed links to Glow; poor form on my part in a Show HN. Awesome app OP!
  - roryisok 9y ago
    well if all her lady friends use it I think you can safely say greater than "one" for your sample size =) I might give it a run for number three!
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    Hey, Baby Buddy developer here - Glow was one of the ones we checked out and liked. Ultimately I think there are some perfectly good apps and websites out there, I was just a little anxious about the data privacy aspect. Maybe I'm being overly protective, but new dad and all (:
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - Amorymeltzer 9y ago
    We're using Feed Baby (http://feedbaby.com.au http://feedbaby.com.au) — it's got a cleaner interface, more options, better graphs, and (to the sibling's comment about privacy) none of the social features.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Are minor deviations from the norm really indicative though. IME babies will have days when they feed non-stop, days when they hardly feed, days when they'll take more naps, data when they won't, etc.. that's just being a baby, they're not ill. Major deviations are normal. Sleep patterns go through stages, for example, and often there's a change over period where there is little pattern; in a day when the child is tired from activity they might sleep much longer. I feel that changes that are indicative of health problems are going to show in the child before you get them from looking at an app.
    - deleted 9y ago
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- ohadron 9y ago
  My experience is identical. I think this kind of app could be really helpful but inputs need to be automated for this to be feasible. Maybe using some IoT devices (baby cradle sleep monitor, diaper box sensor, etc.).
  - giarc 9y ago
    Use Amazon dash buttons throughout the house. A poopy and a wet button near the change station, a nap start and nap end near the crib, a left breast/right breast near the rocking chair etc. Set them to make an API post request.
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      This is a pretty cool idea! Currently the app only has a minimal (Django REST) API, but expanding it to those sorts of functions would be really neat.
  - roryisok 9y ago
    or an end of day prompt with a really quick and simple survey. of course, for some of us, having a newborn means you completely lose track of time. I was off for 4 weeks when our first was born in the height of summer. we slept whenever she slept. I remember waking up once when it was sunny outside, seeing "8:00" on our 12-hour bedside clock and literally not knowing if it was 8 in the morning or 8 in the evening.
  - PMan74 9y ago
    There are companies doing just this for feeding https://mymomsense.com https://mymomsense.com http://milksense.com http://milksense.com (and one other one that had IoT nipple shield that measured flow)
  - stevekemp 9y ago
    I guess it depends on the child, and to a certain extent the parents too, but I found that it was pretty simple to keep track of obvious metrics "woke up" , "fell asleep", "changed nappy". I'd rarely do it in real-time, but I had a notebook I'd update pretty often. That let us predict our childs routine pretty well, enough to schedule naps anyway.
- PMan74 9y ago
  My wife tracked the breast feeding data. Very useful to know how long (so you know roughly home much the baby is getting) and which side (so you can alternate). Without an app this is difficult enough to keep track of e.g. remembering the few feeds in the middle of the night. Would we have survived without it - absolutely. Did it give reassurance, make thing easier - yes. One of the few apps I've ever paid for. But just feed data didn't bother with sleeps, tummy time, dirty/wet nappies.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    >Very useful to know how long (so you know roughly home much the baby is getting) // Length of feed doesn't equate with volume consumed. Does it really help? Weight progression seems like a much stronger indication. Weighing nappies (aka diapers) and child would give useful information. An infant can have a lazy feed, fall asleep whilst suckling, feed hungrily, feed ineffectively. Added to that breast milk changes. What then do you do with that data, it's not like your child feeds 8 minutes, but as you then speculate "volume is down" you can make them feed 9 minutes next time. If they're not unwell they'll feed to satiety. Reassurance, or perhaps it's more just a diversion, is a good enough reason to go mad on stats though.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  We were worried about this too, but in practice it hasn't been an issue. I think perhaps if it were just me or just my wife, it would be a little tougher. But the current flow will sometimes go: wife starts feeding baby, I start a timer for her while her hands are full, one of stops the timer and makes a quick entry when she's done. Feedings are probably the hardest ones to be consistent with, sleep, diaper changes and tummy time all kind of flow naturally.
  - goda90 9y ago
    This seems like a realm where voice assistants could be useful. Tell it to start a timer when feeding, or to record the nature of the diaper change while you're actively changing it.
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      Yeah, that could be really cool. I do actually have a Pi around with Snips[0] on it... I'll have to experiment. [0] https://snips.ai/ https://snips.ai/
zrail 9y ago
This is the app I wish I had during my kiddo’s first few months. Thank you for writing it. If we have another kid we’ll likely use it :) We ended up using WebMD’s baby tracker which was definitely not ideal, but it let my wife and I use both phones for data input.
codeulike 9y ago
A few years ago we used BabyConnect by Seacloud, having it as an app that worked offline and synced was very useful. NB: On your screenshot it says 'Last Feed: Formula, Left Breast' - that confused me, then I realised you're probably doing both (maybe? some people supplement breastfeeding with formula). Is there a way to record how long a breastfeed was? That's pretty important.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Haha, shit. That's unfortunate in the screenshot. Just a symptom of the fake data generation. The app does keep track of breast feeding duration as well, but so far we (my wife and I) haven't done much with that data so it's not well represented.
  - olau 9y ago
    12 solid diapers yesterday also seemed a little... impressive. :)
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      Haha, I know. Our little guy has had 34 wet diapers and one solid in the past week (:
TH3R3LL1K 9y ago
I've got a newborn on the way. This looks like an ideal way to track data and patterns.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Good luck! Let me know if you give it a try, and if you think of anything that could be added/improved. Having the data has been so incredibly help for me and my wife.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I strongly urge you to make a mobile version - it's much easier to enter data on the go, rather than having to walk over to your computer. UX is going to be key here - dropdowns are hard, buttons are easy.
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      Yeah, I really would have liked to make it an app with better handling of offline data and such. But I simply didn't have the setup or experience to approach it that way by the time I decided to start (I think a month or so before our son was born). On the plus side, the current app does have a pretty solid (I think!) mobile UI. When in mobile, there is a special one-click button for starting a timer and bigger "quick add" dropdown for entries. I actually have been meaning to add a mobile version screenshot to highlight the fact that it is pretty functional on mobile (with the caveat that it needs an Internet connection). Mobile is how my wife and I use it about 95% of the time and has been a huge driver in my development of the UI.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        > When in mobile, there is a special one-click button for starting a timer and bigger "quick add" dropdown for entries. Nice! I didn't check it out on mobile. I'm incredibly impressed, btw, that you're working on something like this with a newborn. The month before and after birth, I was basically dead to the world. Kudos to you and her!
Demcox 9y ago
I'm so glad I do not need this....yet!
Amorymeltzer 9y ago
Looks fantastic! One thing I've noticed is that most existing baby-related apps aren't very well designed. Most have plenty of good-enough features, but there always seems to be a slapdash effort that sleep-deprived parents will commit to and never look back from. This is a real nice departure from that, great to see the effort. One suggestion would be to add an import option, for those of us who already have some data. My wife isn't CL-user, so this isn't for us. If you're looking for recommendations, she and I are using Feed Baby (http://feedbaby.com.au http://feedbaby.com.au) because it's got great graphs and really flexible good features without the social crap of Glow. Definitely worth the $6 for unlimited syncing.
- nulagrithom 9y ago
  CL-user?
  - sugarpile 9y ago
    command line
- panmemm 9y ago
  Hi, Amorymeltzer, have you tried Baby Manager app? Seems like it has all features you mentioned. I'd love to get your feedback about it (btw, i'm co-founder of Baby Manager).
vnchr 9y ago
Tracking bowel movements and feedings became a necessity for us as my son had a couple digestion issues when he was born. Collecting data not only helped us manage the situation better, but it was crucial for us to communicate the symptoms to our doctors to get referred to the right specialist for the care he needed. Thanks for sharing this.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  Goes for kids at any age really if they have health problems. My parents' daily tracking of my siblings' asthma status was crucial to get them good care when we were growing up. Both for analysis by the specialists and daily by my parents. Being able to confidently predict "it looks like he will have a cold in one or two days, let's increase his dose and preempt it" based on PEF (peak expiratory flow) measurement done morning and evening was such a boon. Also being able to confidently identify patterns like "he always gets worse when we do X". We did it with pen and paper, but today of course there's an app for that: https://www.spirometry.com/eng/products/smartone.asp https://www.spirometry.com/eng/products/smartone.asp
- moomin 9y ago
  Only if medical professionals actually pay attention to the data you’re gathering. My first daughter had a horrible first few months of life due to an undiagnosed tongue tie. The evidence was right there.
  - mholmes680 9y ago
    100% this. I showed my doc some stats once, and she looked a) annoyed; b) surprised; c) disbelieving. All of which i was not expecting. By the second child i was too tired to keep stats, so we winged it and the docs and I happily acknowledge that ignorance is bliss (sarcasm, i think).
    - moomin 9y ago
      2nd child I got gaslighted again until I went to the _specific person_ who had diagnosed it correctly the first time. And yeah, exactly the same problem (different symptoms, but children are different). Turns out she’d been disciplined after the first time for stepping out of lane. (You’ll note, not for being wrong, the diagnosis got independently confirmed both times.) Medical professionals like and are used to being the unquestioned experts. But you are always the expert of your own child (because, like I said before, every child is different.)
basdp 9y ago
What the actual fuck... You can automate or collect data about anything, but some things are going just too far. From experience I know that the forecasting and predictions you can do with this kind of data is very, very limited. The time and costs you need go through are way too high. I sincerely question why anyone would use this, aside from the hobbying and gadget-ness of this.
- jdironman 9y ago
  It seems to me a lot of time and effort went into this. If it serves OP's needs then it has served it's purpose even if they are the only one to ever use it (which I doubt). As a side note, this is not Reddit, there is no need for that kind of language on this site.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Haha, a year ago I probably would have agreed that this seems a bit ridiculous. But after months of reading about caring for newborns and raising children, it became abundantly clear to me that data like this can be useful. After about a month of collecting data, we have a pretty good handle on baby's "schedule" and can take a quick look at our dashboard to help determine why he might be crying his little face off. After many weeks of frustrating struggle with this, I can't even put a price on the value of the data we now have. YMMV (:
  - andrewem 9y ago
    Helping out with another person's baby, I found that it was useful to see things like "is the baby behind on their usual food intake?" or "has the baby been asleep for a long time?" Tracking (via any means) was helpful to find such information, as you say.
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      This actually makes me think the app needs some sort of quick statistical data in the dashboard, or somewhere, for non-regular caregivers (e.g. a friend/new babysitter). My wife and I have spent so much time with the data that we "just know" the timing of things and the "last X (feeding, sleep, etc.)" is enough for us. But that wouldn't necessarily suffice for others. Thanks for the insight!
cmer 9y ago
This is awesome! Fun hack to make data entry easy: Use hacked Amazon Dash buttons for really quick data entry. ie: press a button when feeding the baby, press another button when changing diaper.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  Shameless plug: https://github.com/ipartola/amadash https://github.com/ipartola/amadash This is a general purpose daemon I wrote that monitors an arbitrary number of Dash buttons and does whatever you want when they are pressed.
  - lpasselin 9y ago
    Is there an alternative to dash buttons in Canada?
    - whitef0x 9y ago
      You could build your own like this http://www.simpleiothings.com/build-a-10-wifi-smart-button/ http://www.simpleiothings.com/build-a-10-wifi-smart-button/
    - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
      I bought a Flic button which works pretty well, using it at the office for hour tracking; it's more pricy though. Normally they are tied to a phone, so if you want it to work for multiple users, you need their hub as well.
    - malingo 9y ago
      Single-button app on your phone: https://ifttt.com/do_button https://ifttt.com/do_button
    - matt_the_bass 9y ago
      I like particle photons. That can used in these: https://www.particle.io/products/hardware/internet-button https://www.particle.io/products/hardware/internet-button No hacking required.
kelukelugames 9y ago
Shit. I have a baby due next week. My first one. Help?
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Haha, good luck! Due in week may mean you get a baby tomorrow (: If you are becoming a new father, I very highly recommend The Expectant Father and The New Father. Really great books about what you and your partner will go through. It's intense!
  - Spoom 9y ago
    Can verify that these books are quite good. We ended up with a very easy baby, although slightly preemie and we were worried about her weight for a while. She's running around like crazy now though!
- srj 9y ago
  In the first week especially, track feedings and diaper output closely. Breast feeding can be tough to get going and you don't have a better method on finding out if they're getting what they should.
  - olau 9y ago
    For our first-born I bought a cheap digital fish weighing scale (1 gram resolution, I think I paid 1-2 USD for it) from Taiwan because I found it incredible that the midwives/nursing staff was basing their assessments on either low-resolution analogue scales or a single readout from a digital scale. You can weigh the baby once or twice each day and track whether they're gaining weight or not. But don't fret - overthinking this can lead to everything turning sour and frightening, even if the baby is fine. You don't want to be frightened, you want both baby and mother to relax and get some sleep so they are motivated to try again. We've always had babies that were relatively awake the first week - that means relatively more grumpy that there isn't yet enough milk. Last time, my wife gave the baby a little bit of the breast milk substitution you can buy to get through that period. That really helped. Baby happy and asleep for longer and the mother didn't have a baby chewing up her nipples all the time.
koolba 9y ago
Looks neat but from what I've gathered a notepad and pen works best for this. No app can compare with the speed of a quick scribble. Having the data digitized is fun though (poop charts!). Found a couple bugs: - The sleep pattern page gives a 500 if you haven't slept yet. Likely a null pointer / empty list situation. - I think you may have some time zone issues. Some of the timeline pages display histrical events that occurred in the future.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Thanks for checking it out! Pen and paper was our original plan as well, but I wanted to be able to aggregate and graph information easily. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some TZ issues. I'm still fairly new to Django and had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around its TZ handling at first. I probably need to revisit some of the earlier commits.
catshirt 9y ago
how come no one ever told me you have to change diapers 20 times a day. wtf??
matzy 9y ago
As someone without kids and who has never been around babies, what the heck is 'tummy time'?
- hsrada 9y ago
  It's when a baby needs to be fed?
- koolba 9y ago
  It's placing the baby on it's stomach ("tummy") so he can practice raising his neck to strengthen those muscles. It's the first step to being able to roll over and sit up.
  - andrewem 9y ago
    The reason tummy time is recommended is because now it's encouraged to have babies sleep on their backs to avoid SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). The down side is they don't get time on their stomachs to work those muscles, and so you have to put them on their stomachs (and supervise them). Edit: information from an actual authority rather than just me: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sts/about/Pages/tummytime.aspx https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sts/about/Pages/tummytime.aspx
    - derefr 9y ago
      Fun other fact: the vertebrate digestive system evolved to "hang downward"—i.e. for gravity to aid digestion by pulling matter toward your anterior. If you ever feel gassy, one of the best solutions is to lay on your stomach and then slightly elevate your butt until you've created a pathway where the gas can exit by rising. Similarly, if you ever feel constipated or have acid reflux, try just getting down on your elbows and knees (on your bed or another soft surface) and then relaxing your core to let your stomach just hang down. Picture imitating the body position of a cow. Everything should run in the right direction again after 10 or 20 minutes of this (bring a book.) I bring this up because, of course, babies shouldn't be any different. If a baby—especially after weening—is colicky and looks to be in pain, it might be gassy bloating that it has no idea how to resolve. Flip them over.
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andrewrd 9y ago
I'll be recommending this app to a relative of mine. I really like the fact you've open sourced it. Nice work.
- thecompilr 9y ago
  I recommend an app called Baby Tracker on iPhone (not sure if theres an android version). I recently found out it even has an apple watch companion app. Very convenient.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Thanks! I went back and forth on open sourcing only because I think there may be potential for building a service like this for daycares in addition to parents. My decision to work on it stemmed largely from the ~20 different daycares my wife and I visited. All of them had a pen and paper tracking system for infants so it gave me lots of ideas.
artursapek 9y ago
Someone got too much paternity leave! :)
devdad 9y ago
You shouldn't need these kind of apps. Listen to your child. They communicate quite clearly what they need, and after a while you understand their patterns. This is one of those areas where I believe technology will do more harm than good
planetjones 9y ago
There’s an excellent app called BabyConnect that we used for this with our daughter. Of course eventually we (like most parents I believe) learned to relax and not obsessively record sleep, feeds and nappies. My friends who have more than one child said after the first they didn’t do any recording like this and instead just let things take their natural course. There is a market for this. But I can’t see anything doing a better job than baby connect.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  That looks good and is along the lines of how I was thinking Baby Buddy could develop if not as an open source project - e.g. as a service to sell to caregivers. I don't recall seeing that one back when we were looking at options.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- eli 9y ago
  Agreed on all points. Though in the early sleep-deprived months I did find it useful to have a big, dashboard-style display. I built one with a userscript on top of the Baby Connect web interface. Our daughter had feeding issues and medicine that had to be administered in certain intervals so it was really useful to see at a glance what was going on. The feature I really wanted was Alexa or Google Home integration for logging events or checking times.
  - robbinspaul 9y ago
    Eli, check out https://www.alexaskillstore.com/Day-Carrier/B01M993V1H https://www.alexaskillstore.com/Day-Carrier/B01M993V1H and https://www.daycarrier.com https://www.daycarrier.com. I built the Alexa skill for this type of tracking
- Impossible 9y ago
  My wife and I have been using BabyConnect since our son was born (he's 4 months now) and while the app is fine, I could definitely imagine something that does the same thing better. UX could definitely be better or prettier, network synchronization could work better. Beyond that it might be fun for the app to do some data analysis or have reminders, but that's a slippery slope. Parents freaking out about some simple algorithm mis-predicting their kids behavior is not a good thing...
goodoldboys 9y ago
As someone who is both an avid Django user and about to be a new parent, this is awesome! Expect a PR or two from me :)
- LrnByTeach 9y ago
  Good to know it is Pyhton Django
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Woo! My biggest hope with open sourcing this is to find other new or soon-to-be new parents with ideas for making it even better. It is such a huge motivator for me. Looking forward to your input.
nyxtom 9y ago
We did something similar for our newborn in the first few months of sleep deprivation. It helped us with focus until we relaxed and could keep better track of it on our own in our head. The key thing these things miss is keeping track of yourself.
robbinspaul 9y ago
This great. I’ve got an Alexa app I built (https://www.daycarrier.com https://www.daycarrier.com / https://www.amazon.com/robbinspaul-Day-Carrier/dp/B01M993V1H https://www.amazon.com/robbinspaul-Day-Carrier/dp/B01M993V1H) that tracks this stuff via Alexa that’s I’d love to try and integrate with this!
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sundvor 9y ago
This is great :) Expecting a baby girl next year, so will give the project a go. Wish I had something like it for our first. Have a big 65" in the living room connected to a HTPC so the dashboard would be much loved. Also a great opportunity to brush on my Py.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Nice! Feel free to PR or hit me up if you think of features that might be worth adding.
  - sundvor 9y ago
    If I can find some time, I will do. One thing I thought of was to be able to log the extraction process for bottling milk - that was something that was rather frustrating IIRC. Cheers!
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      We thought about that and figured it wasn't really necessary (for us). I think it would need to be a new model, which could be used to track the status of pumped milk (and may well be super helpful, particularly later on) but UX wise that would introduce a bit of complication with the feeding entry process. It's certainly doable, just not something my wife prioritized. Right now she just pumps when she feels full and baby isn't ready to eat. Then I get to do the night feeding and record it as a bottle feeding with Xoz of breast milk (:
ThomPete 9y ago
I love these services but I never used them for my kids and would never use them. There is definitely a good market for it especially in the US where everyone is paranoid and you have liability issues etc but I just learned not to worry about it and that's with a son who was born 10 weeks too early. But looks like a great solution for those who need some peace of mind.
purephase 9y ago
Back in my sleep-deprived days after my oldest was born I had an app idea similar to this, but with an added dash of AI/machine learning. Imagine a bunch of parents using a free/relatively inexpensive application, tracking feeding schedules, sleep, food intake, play etc. and then ranking each day as a thumbs up/down. Taking that data, properly anonymizing it and then comparing it across babies with similar characteristics (location, age, siblings etc.) you could suggest a daily schedule (with alerts) that would trend closer to a thumbs up. Started with a prototype, but it never amounted to much. I just imagine the collective value of some of the data managed by these applications and the potential to ease the extremely challenging (but rewarding!) experience of being a parent.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  I thought about this along the way. It would be really cool to have some alert that says, "Baby is probably ready for a nap" or "Baby probably needs a diaper change", but the ML side of that is far outside my domain. Did you get far enough to judge whether or not such a thing would be very feasible, given how babies can develop so drastically differently?
  - purephase 9y ago
    I didn't get far enough, unfortunately. This was a number of years ago, and not the panacea for ML/AI that we have now. The variance in data is certainly a concern, but the free/inexpensive nature of the app itself was intended to gather as much as possible (anonymity being absolutely key, given the subject) and start looking at data points vs. positive ratings to find the correlation. At the very least, that sort of data would be incredibly value for academia/research etc.
    - cdubzzz 9y ago
      Shoot me an email (see HN profile/website) if you ever think about reviving the idea. I would be very interested to colloborate.
- panmemm 9y ago

172 points by cdubzzz 9y ago

cool app, but in my limited experience with newborns, there just isn't enough time to input data into a system like this to get the cool reports.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Sample size of one, but my wife and all of her female friends used an iOS app called "Glow" to track the same data as this app (religiously logging after each feeding, nap, and diaper change). Apps like this are extremely helpful to identify deviations from the norm that could be indicitive of a problem the child is having. EDIT: Removed links to Glow; poor form on my part in a Show HN. Awesome app OP!
- roryisok 9y ago
  well if all her lady friends use it I think you can safely say greater than "one" for your sample size =) I might give it a run for number three!
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  Hey, Baby Buddy developer here - Glow was one of the ones we checked out and liked. Ultimately I think there are some perfectly good apps and websites out there, I was just a little anxious about the data privacy aspect. Maybe I'm being overly protective, but new dad and all (:
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- Amorymeltzer 9y ago
  We're using Feed Baby (http://feedbaby.com.au http://feedbaby.com.au) — it's got a cleaner interface, more options, better graphs, and (to the sibling's comment about privacy) none of the social features.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Are minor deviations from the norm really indicative though. IME babies will have days when they feed non-stop, days when they hardly feed, days when they'll take more naps, data when they won't, etc.. that's just being a baby, they're not ill. Major deviations are normal. Sleep patterns go through stages, for example, and often there's a change over period where there is little pattern; in a day when the child is tired from activity they might sleep much longer. I feel that changes that are indicative of health problems are going to show in the child before you get them from looking at an app.
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ohadron 9y ago
My experience is identical. I think this kind of app could be really helpful but inputs need to be automated for this to be feasible. Maybe using some IoT devices (baby cradle sleep monitor, diaper box sensor, etc.).
- giarc 9y ago
  Use Amazon dash buttons throughout the house. A poopy and a wet button near the change station, a nap start and nap end near the crib, a left breast/right breast near the rocking chair etc. Set them to make an API post request.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    This is a pretty cool idea! Currently the app only has a minimal (Django REST) API, but expanding it to those sorts of functions would be really neat.
- roryisok 9y ago
  or an end of day prompt with a really quick and simple survey. of course, for some of us, having a newborn means you completely lose track of time. I was off for 4 weeks when our first was born in the height of summer. we slept whenever she slept. I remember waking up once when it was sunny outside, seeing "8:00" on our 12-hour bedside clock and literally not knowing if it was 8 in the morning or 8 in the evening.
- PMan74 9y ago
  There are companies doing just this for feeding https://mymomsense.com https://mymomsense.com http://milksense.com http://milksense.com (and one other one that had IoT nipple shield that measured flow)
- stevekemp 9y ago
  I guess it depends on the child, and to a certain extent the parents too, but I found that it was pretty simple to keep track of obvious metrics "woke up" , "fell asleep", "changed nappy". I'd rarely do it in real-time, but I had a notebook I'd update pretty often. That let us predict our childs routine pretty well, enough to schedule naps anyway.
PMan74 9y ago
My wife tracked the breast feeding data. Very useful to know how long (so you know roughly home much the baby is getting) and which side (so you can alternate). Without an app this is difficult enough to keep track of e.g. remembering the few feeds in the middle of the night. Would we have survived without it - absolutely. Did it give reassurance, make thing easier - yes. One of the few apps I've ever paid for. But just feed data didn't bother with sleeps, tummy time, dirty/wet nappies.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >Very useful to know how long (so you know roughly home much the baby is getting) // Length of feed doesn't equate with volume consumed. Does it really help? Weight progression seems like a much stronger indication. Weighing nappies (aka diapers) and child would give useful information. An infant can have a lazy feed, fall asleep whilst suckling, feed hungrily, feed ineffectively. Added to that breast milk changes. What then do you do with that data, it's not like your child feeds 8 minutes, but as you then speculate "volume is down" you can make them feed 9 minutes next time. If they're not unwell they'll feed to satiety. Reassurance, or perhaps it's more just a diversion, is a good enough reason to go mad on stats though.
cdubzzz 9y ago
We were worried about this too, but in practice it hasn't been an issue. I think perhaps if it were just me or just my wife, it would be a little tougher. But the current flow will sometimes go: wife starts feeding baby, I start a timer for her while her hands are full, one of stops the timer and makes a quick entry when she's done. Feedings are probably the hardest ones to be consistent with, sleep, diaper changes and tummy time all kind of flow naturally.
- goda90 9y ago
  This seems like a realm where voice assistants could be useful. Tell it to start a timer when feeding, or to record the nature of the diaper change while you're actively changing it.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    Yeah, that could be really cool. I do actually have a Pi around with Snips[0] on it... I'll have to experiment. [0] https://snips.ai/ https://snips.ai/

zrail 9y ago

This is the app I wish I had during my kiddo’s first few months. Thank you for writing it. If we have another kid we’ll likely use it :) We ended up using WebMD’s baby tracker which was definitely not ideal, but it let my wife and I use both phones for data input.

codeulike 9y ago

A few years ago we used BabyConnect by Seacloud, having it as an app that worked offline and synced was very useful. NB: On your screenshot it says 'Last Feed: Formula, Left Breast' - that confused me, then I realised you're probably doing both (maybe? some people supplement breastfeeding with formula). Is there a way to record how long a breastfeed was? That's pretty important.

cdubzzz 9y ago
Haha, shit. That's unfortunate in the screenshot. Just a symptom of the fake data generation. The app does keep track of breast feeding duration as well, but so far we (my wife and I) haven't done much with that data so it's not well represented.
- olau 9y ago
  12 solid diapers yesterday also seemed a little... impressive. :)
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    Haha, I know. Our little guy has had 34 wet diapers and one solid in the past week (:

TH3R3LL1K 9y ago

I've got a newborn on the way. This looks like an ideal way to track data and patterns.

cdubzzz 9y ago
Good luck! Let me know if you give it a try, and if you think of anything that could be added/improved. Having the data has been so incredibly help for me and my wife.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I strongly urge you to make a mobile version - it's much easier to enter data on the go, rather than having to walk over to your computer. UX is going to be key here - dropdowns are hard, buttons are easy.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    Yeah, I really would have liked to make it an app with better handling of offline data and such. But I simply didn't have the setup or experience to approach it that way by the time I decided to start (I think a month or so before our son was born). On the plus side, the current app does have a pretty solid (I think!) mobile UI. When in mobile, there is a special one-click button for starting a timer and bigger "quick add" dropdown for entries. I actually have been meaning to add a mobile version screenshot to highlight the fact that it is pretty functional on mobile (with the caveat that it needs an Internet connection). Mobile is how my wife and I use it about 95% of the time and has been a huge driver in my development of the UI.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > When in mobile, there is a special one-click button for starting a timer and bigger "quick add" dropdown for entries. Nice! I didn't check it out on mobile. I'm incredibly impressed, btw, that you're working on something like this with a newborn. The month before and after birth, I was basically dead to the world. Kudos to you and her!

Demcox 9y ago

I'm so glad I do not need this....yet!

Amorymeltzer 9y ago

Looks fantastic! One thing I've noticed is that most existing baby-related apps aren't very well designed. Most have plenty of good-enough features, but there always seems to be a slapdash effort that sleep-deprived parents will commit to and never look back from. This is a real nice departure from that, great to see the effort. One suggestion would be to add an import option, for those of us who already have some data. My wife isn't CL-user, so this isn't for us. If you're looking for recommendations, she and I are using Feed Baby (http://feedbaby.com.au http://feedbaby.com.au) because it's got great graphs and really flexible good features without the social crap of Glow. Definitely worth the $6 for unlimited syncing.

nulagrithom 9y ago
CL-user?
- sugarpile 9y ago
  command line
panmemm 9y ago
Hi, Amorymeltzer, have you tried Baby Manager app? Seems like it has all features you mentioned. I'd love to get your feedback about it (btw, i'm co-founder of Baby Manager).

vnchr 9y ago

Tracking bowel movements and feedings became a necessity for us as my son had a couple digestion issues when he was born. Collecting data not only helped us manage the situation better, but it was crucial for us to communicate the symptoms to our doctors to get referred to the right specialist for the care he needed. Thanks for sharing this.

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
Goes for kids at any age really if they have health problems. My parents' daily tracking of my siblings' asthma status was crucial to get them good care when we were growing up. Both for analysis by the specialists and daily by my parents. Being able to confidently predict "it looks like he will have a cold in one or two days, let's increase his dose and preempt it" based on PEF (peak expiratory flow) measurement done morning and evening was such a boon. Also being able to confidently identify patterns like "he always gets worse when we do X". We did it with pen and paper, but today of course there's an app for that: https://www.spirometry.com/eng/products/smartone.asp https://www.spirometry.com/eng/products/smartone.asp
moomin 9y ago
Only if medical professionals actually pay attention to the data you’re gathering. My first daughter had a horrible first few months of life due to an undiagnosed tongue tie. The evidence was right there.
- mholmes680 9y ago
  100% this. I showed my doc some stats once, and she looked a) annoyed; b) surprised; c) disbelieving. All of which i was not expecting. By the second child i was too tired to keep stats, so we winged it and the docs and I happily acknowledge that ignorance is bliss (sarcasm, i think).
  - moomin 9y ago
    2nd child I got gaslighted again until I went to the _specific person_ who had diagnosed it correctly the first time. And yeah, exactly the same problem (different symptoms, but children are different). Turns out she’d been disciplined after the first time for stepping out of lane. (You’ll note, not for being wrong, the diagnosis got independently confirmed both times.) Medical professionals like and are used to being the unquestioned experts. But you are always the expert of your own child (because, like I said before, every child is different.)

basdp 9y ago

What the actual fuck... You can automate or collect data about anything, but some things are going just too far. From experience I know that the forecasting and predictions you can do with this kind of data is very, very limited. The time and costs you need go through are way too high. I sincerely question why anyone would use this, aside from the hobbying and gadget-ness of this.

jdironman 9y ago
It seems to me a lot of time and effort went into this. If it serves OP's needs then it has served it's purpose even if they are the only one to ever use it (which I doubt). As a side note, this is not Reddit, there is no need for that kind of language on this site.
cdubzzz 9y ago
Haha, a year ago I probably would have agreed that this seems a bit ridiculous. But after months of reading about caring for newborns and raising children, it became abundantly clear to me that data like this can be useful. After about a month of collecting data, we have a pretty good handle on baby's "schedule" and can take a quick look at our dashboard to help determine why he might be crying his little face off. After many weeks of frustrating struggle with this, I can't even put a price on the value of the data we now have. YMMV (:
- andrewem 9y ago
  Helping out with another person's baby, I found that it was useful to see things like "is the baby behind on their usual food intake?" or "has the baby been asleep for a long time?" Tracking (via any means) was helpful to find such information, as you say.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    This actually makes me think the app needs some sort of quick statistical data in the dashboard, or somewhere, for non-regular caregivers (e.g. a friend/new babysitter). My wife and I have spent so much time with the data that we "just know" the timing of things and the "last X (feeding, sleep, etc.)" is enough for us. But that wouldn't necessarily suffice for others. Thanks for the insight!

cmer 9y ago

This is awesome! Fun hack to make data entry easy: Use hacked Amazon Dash buttons for really quick data entry. ie: press a button when feeding the baby, press another button when changing diaper.

IgorPartola 9y ago
Shameless plug: https://github.com/ipartola/amadash https://github.com/ipartola/amadash This is a general purpose daemon I wrote that monitors an arbitrary number of Dash buttons and does whatever you want when they are pressed.
- lpasselin 9y ago
  Is there an alternative to dash buttons in Canada?
  - whitef0x 9y ago
    You could build your own like this http://www.simpleiothings.com/build-a-10-wifi-smart-button/ http://www.simpleiothings.com/build-a-10-wifi-smart-button/
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    I bought a Flic button which works pretty well, using it at the office for hour tracking; it's more pricy though. Normally they are tied to a phone, so if you want it to work for multiple users, you need their hub as well.
  - malingo 9y ago
    Single-button app on your phone: https://ifttt.com/do_button https://ifttt.com/do_button
  - matt_the_bass 9y ago
    I like particle photons. That can used in these: https://www.particle.io/products/hardware/internet-button https://www.particle.io/products/hardware/internet-button No hacking required.

kelukelugames 9y ago

Shit. I have a baby due next week. My first one. Help?

cdubzzz 9y ago
Haha, good luck! Due in week may mean you get a baby tomorrow (: If you are becoming a new father, I very highly recommend The Expectant Father and The New Father. Really great books about what you and your partner will go through. It's intense!
- Spoom 9y ago
  Can verify that these books are quite good. We ended up with a very easy baby, although slightly preemie and we were worried about her weight for a while. She's running around like crazy now though!
srj 9y ago
In the first week especially, track feedings and diaper output closely. Breast feeding can be tough to get going and you don't have a better method on finding out if they're getting what they should.
- olau 9y ago
  For our first-born I bought a cheap digital fish weighing scale (1 gram resolution, I think I paid 1-2 USD for it) from Taiwan because I found it incredible that the midwives/nursing staff was basing their assessments on either low-resolution analogue scales or a single readout from a digital scale. You can weigh the baby once or twice each day and track whether they're gaining weight or not. But don't fret - overthinking this can lead to everything turning sour and frightening, even if the baby is fine. You don't want to be frightened, you want both baby and mother to relax and get some sleep so they are motivated to try again. We've always had babies that were relatively awake the first week - that means relatively more grumpy that there isn't yet enough milk. Last time, my wife gave the baby a little bit of the breast milk substitution you can buy to get through that period. That really helped. Baby happy and asleep for longer and the mother didn't have a baby chewing up her nipples all the time.

koolba 9y ago

Looks neat but from what I've gathered a notepad and pen works best for this. No app can compare with the speed of a quick scribble. Having the data digitized is fun though (poop charts!). Found a couple bugs: - The sleep pattern page gives a 500 if you haven't slept yet. Likely a null pointer / empty list situation. - I think you may have some time zone issues. Some of the timeline pages display histrical events that occurred in the future.

cdubzzz 9y ago
Thanks for checking it out! Pen and paper was our original plan as well, but I wanted to be able to aggregate and graph information easily. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some TZ issues. I'm still fairly new to Django and had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around its TZ handling at first. I probably need to revisit some of the earlier commits.

catshirt 9y ago

how come no one ever told me you have to change diapers 20 times a day. wtf??

matzy 9y ago

As someone without kids and who has never been around babies, what the heck is 'tummy time'?

hsrada 9y ago
It's when a baby needs to be fed?
koolba 9y ago
It's placing the baby on it's stomach ("tummy") so he can practice raising his neck to strengthen those muscles. It's the first step to being able to roll over and sit up.
- andrewem 9y ago
  The reason tummy time is recommended is because now it's encouraged to have babies sleep on their backs to avoid SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). The down side is they don't get time on their stomachs to work those muscles, and so you have to put them on their stomachs (and supervise them). Edit: information from an actual authority rather than just me: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sts/about/Pages/tummytime.aspx https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sts/about/Pages/tummytime.aspx
  - derefr 9y ago
    Fun other fact: the vertebrate digestive system evolved to "hang downward"—i.e. for gravity to aid digestion by pulling matter toward your anterior. If you ever feel gassy, one of the best solutions is to lay on your stomach and then slightly elevate your butt until you've created a pathway where the gas can exit by rising. Similarly, if you ever feel constipated or have acid reflux, try just getting down on your elbows and knees (on your bed or another soft surface) and then relaxing your core to let your stomach just hang down. Picture imitating the body position of a cow. Everything should run in the right direction again after 10 or 20 minutes of this (bring a book.) I bring this up because, of course, babies shouldn't be any different. If a baby—especially after weening—is colicky and looks to be in pain, it might be gassy bloating that it has no idea how to resolve. Flip them over.

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andrewrd 9y ago

I'll be recommending this app to a relative of mine. I really like the fact you've open sourced it. Nice work.

thecompilr 9y ago
I recommend an app called Baby Tracker on iPhone (not sure if theres an android version). I recently found out it even has an apple watch companion app. Very convenient.
cdubzzz 9y ago
Thanks! I went back and forth on open sourcing only because I think there may be potential for building a service like this for daycares in addition to parents. My decision to work on it stemmed largely from the ~20 different daycares my wife and I visited. All of them had a pen and paper tracking system for infants so it gave me lots of ideas.

artursapek 9y ago

Someone got too much paternity leave! :)

devdad 9y ago

You shouldn't need these kind of apps. Listen to your child. They communicate quite clearly what they need, and after a while you understand their patterns. This is one of those areas where I believe technology will do more harm than good

planetjones 9y ago

There’s an excellent app called BabyConnect that we used for this with our daughter. Of course eventually we (like most parents I believe) learned to relax and not obsessively record sleep, feeds and nappies. My friends who have more than one child said after the first they didn’t do any recording like this and instead just let things take their natural course. There is a market for this. But I can’t see anything doing a better job than baby connect.

cdubzzz 9y ago
That looks good and is along the lines of how I was thinking Baby Buddy could develop if not as an open source project - e.g. as a service to sell to caregivers. I don't recall seeing that one back when we were looking at options.
- deleted 9y ago
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eli 9y ago
Agreed on all points. Though in the early sleep-deprived months I did find it useful to have a big, dashboard-style display. I built one with a userscript on top of the Baby Connect web interface. Our daughter had feeding issues and medicine that had to be administered in certain intervals so it was really useful to see at a glance what was going on. The feature I really wanted was Alexa or Google Home integration for logging events or checking times.
- robbinspaul 9y ago
  Eli, check out https://www.alexaskillstore.com/Day-Carrier/B01M993V1H https://www.alexaskillstore.com/Day-Carrier/B01M993V1H and https://www.daycarrier.com https://www.daycarrier.com. I built the Alexa skill for this type of tracking
Impossible 9y ago
My wife and I have been using BabyConnect since our son was born (he's 4 months now) and while the app is fine, I could definitely imagine something that does the same thing better. UX could definitely be better or prettier, network synchronization could work better. Beyond that it might be fun for the app to do some data analysis or have reminders, but that's a slippery slope. Parents freaking out about some simple algorithm mis-predicting their kids behavior is not a good thing...

goodoldboys 9y ago

As someone who is both an avid Django user and about to be a new parent, this is awesome! Expect a PR or two from me :)

LrnByTeach 9y ago
Good to know it is Pyhton Django
cdubzzz 9y ago
Woo! My biggest hope with open sourcing this is to find other new or soon-to-be new parents with ideas for making it even better. It is such a huge motivator for me. Looking forward to your input.

nyxtom 9y ago

We did something similar for our newborn in the first few months of sleep deprivation. It helped us with focus until we relaxed and could keep better track of it on our own in our head. The key thing these things miss is keeping track of yourself.

robbinspaul 9y ago

This great. I’ve got an Alexa app I built (https://www.daycarrier.com https://www.daycarrier.com / https://www.amazon.com/robbinspaul-Day-Carrier/dp/B01M993V1H https://www.amazon.com/robbinspaul-Day-Carrier/dp/B01M993V1H) that tracks this stuff via Alexa that’s I’d love to try and integrate with this!

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sundvor 9y ago

This is great :) Expecting a baby girl next year, so will give the project a go. Wish I had something like it for our first. Have a big 65" in the living room connected to a HTPC so the dashboard would be much loved. Also a great opportunity to brush on my Py.

cdubzzz 9y ago
Nice! Feel free to PR or hit me up if you think of features that might be worth adding.
- sundvor 9y ago
  If I can find some time, I will do. One thing I thought of was to be able to log the extraction process for bottling milk - that was something that was rather frustrating IIRC. Cheers!
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    We thought about that and figured it wasn't really necessary (for us). I think it would need to be a new model, which could be used to track the status of pumped milk (and may well be super helpful, particularly later on) but UX wise that would introduce a bit of complication with the feeding entry process. It's certainly doable, just not something my wife prioritized. Right now she just pumps when she feels full and baby isn't ready to eat. Then I get to do the night feeding and record it as a bottle feeding with Xoz of breast milk (:

ThomPete 9y ago

I love these services but I never used them for my kids and would never use them. There is definitely a good market for it especially in the US where everyone is paranoid and you have liability issues etc but I just learned not to worry about it and that's with a son who was born 10 weeks too early. But looks like a great solution for those who need some peace of mind.

purephase 9y ago

Back in my sleep-deprived days after my oldest was born I had an app idea similar to this, but with an added dash of AI/machine learning. Imagine a bunch of parents using a free/relatively inexpensive application, tracking feeding schedules, sleep, food intake, play etc. and then ranking each day as a thumbs up/down. Taking that data, properly anonymizing it and then comparing it across babies with similar characteristics (location, age, siblings etc.) you could suggest a daily schedule (with alerts) that would trend closer to a thumbs up. Started with a prototype, but it never amounted to much. I just imagine the collective value of some of the data managed by these applications and the potential to ease the extremely challenging (but rewarding!) experience of being a parent.

cdubzzz 9y ago
I thought about this along the way. It would be really cool to have some alert that says, "Baby is probably ready for a nap" or "Baby probably needs a diaper change", but the ML side of that is far outside my domain. Did you get far enough to judge whether or not such a thing would be very feasible, given how babies can develop so drastically differently?
- purephase 9y ago
  I didn't get far enough, unfortunately. This was a number of years ago, and not the panacea for ML/AI that we have now. The variance in data is certainly a concern, but the free/inexpensive nature of the app itself was intended to gather as much as possible (anonymity being absolutely key, given the subject) and start looking at data points vs. positive ratings to find the correlation. At the very least, that sort of data would be incredibly value for academia/research etc.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    Shoot me an email (see HN profile/website) if you ever think about reviving the idea. I would be very interested to colloborate.
panmemm 9y ago