14 ms·

Create your own smart baby monitor with a RaspberryPi and TensorFlow

179 points by sebg 6y ago

hellepardo 6y ago
So, don't get me wrong. This is a fun project and a neat little device. I don't mean to take away from it in any way. However it is really important to consider why baby monitors are so primitive: because the cost of a false negative is huge. I didn't see any mention of this in the author's experiments (only a '>98% accuracy' note). So let's talk about this a little bit: is "accuracy" what we want? Probably not---I don't care if I get accidentally notified, but I care very much if I don't get notified when the baby is crying. So you want to weight your classifier's predictions heavily against false negatives (at the price of false positives). It would be good to make an ROC curve to characterize this behavior. More importantly though, any predictive model assumes a stationary distribution; i.e., training conditions accurately reflect test conditions. But will they in real life? What about when your neighbor's house is under construction? Can interference from chainsaws cause the model to fail to detect the baby crying? What about the dude down the street with his super loud motorcycle? What happens then? I bet the training set doesn't have situations like this. I really, really don't want to come off like a wet blanket here. But I feel obligated to, because this is a model that directly impacts the welfare of a human, and so we should at least talk about or discuss potential drawbacks. (Again, cool weekend project, just, we need to be clear about the implications of outsourcing the decision of whether the baby is crying to a black-box model where we can't interpret what it's doing.)
- lake_vincent 6y ago
  Was going to come here to say something very similar. I'm no luddite, but some things really shouldn't be left to tech like this...
  - siminm 6y ago
    Fearing the worst outcome ought to inspire you to make the tech better, not avoid it altogether.
    - devenblake 6y ago
      But the tech exists. It's not like we're using tin cans and string and trying to replace that with a gizmo; we have the gizmo, and now we're trying to make an open-source version of it. While the goal is admirable there's no real benefit from using a less-tested Raspberry Pi project. There are less risky ways to learn the same lessons - a video walky-talky maybe.
      - harperlee 6y ago
        As a father, I generally agree with what you both are saying regarding being conservative with tech choices on delicate areas such as babies, but I‘d also add that 99% of situations of my baby making random noises (that also trigger a baby monitor) are not something that are going yo have an impact on the baby long term. Most times my baby has lost the pacifier in the dark, and finds it before I reach upstairs (or annoyingly, between me waking up, and me reaching my bedroom door). Also there’s the scary converse: some important things do not make a noise, such as a baby suffocating in her sleep.
  - rhacker 6y ago
    Maybe not this specifically but a similar tech should be considered to detect babies in hot cars.
    - scruple 6y ago
      Automobile manufacturers are doing this now, IIRC. With sensors on the seats to remind you that you put something heavy into the car.
      - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
        Hmm, I don't think so - seat sensors are used to enable / disable passenger airbags, my memory is that they only register weights over 40lb / 18kg.
        scruple 6y ago
        > In 2016, General Motors took the lead among automotive manufacturers by introducing the Rear Seat Reminder, a technology designed to nudge drivers to check their back seats as they exit their vehicles. It uses an audible alert and a front panel message to tell drivers to check the rear of their vehicle for occupants. > Rear Seat Reminder technology became standard on all new Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac four-door sedans, SUVs, and crossovers starting with the 2019 model year, and also will be standard on all 2020 model year GM pickup trucks, said GM spokesperson Phil Lienert. > Kia, Nissan, and Subaru offer rear-seat alert systems in many of their models, according to Car and Driver, and Hyundai announced on July 31 – National Heatstroke Day – that it planned to incorporate the technology across all models by 2022. One of Hyundai’s newest innovations is the Ultrasonic Rear Occupant Alert, in which a sensor can detect the presence of a child (or pet) and activates a loud horn if the driver leaves with the child inside. https://mashable.com/article/car-seat-alarms-prevent-hot-car-death/ https://mashable.com/article/car-seat-alarms-prevent-hot-car...
        blacksmith_tb 6y ago
        Interesting, though hard to see how that prevents people from leaving children and pets in the front seats...
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  > So you want to weight your classifier's predictions heavily against false negatives (at the price of false positives). Which makes me think that a simple trigger based on ambient sound level probably does the job... I suspect that many baby monitors work that way. This also actually makes sense because I likely want to be alerted in case of noise in general rather than just cries, just in case.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I have to agree - I like tinkering and hacking as much as the next dev, and I don't like to be negative, but... what is the point of AI/ML here, where a simple sounds trigger works just fine? What problem is it actually solving - I only see this approach causing problems.
- nicolashahn 6y ago
  Forgive me for bringing it up, but this is also the reason why smart gun technology is a complete dead end.
  - Grakel 6y ago
    I wonder if there are huge advances to be made in suppressor technology? Other than the noise, guns are basically perfect in their intended function. I guess you could try to further reduce recoil.
    - nicolashahn 6y ago
      If we could get a caseless ammo system to work I think that'd be pretty game changing. Lots of factors going against that though.
      - Grakel 6y ago
        Yes, that's a great point.
    - time0ut 6y ago
      There have been some pretty fascinating experimental weapons over the the years. For example, the H&K G11 [0] used caseless ammunition. The potential advantages of that are no need to eject a spent casing and a soldier can carry more of it since it weighs less. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11
      - Grakel 6y ago
        That would be a game changer for sure.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      Oh, there's a lot more stuff that can be done to guns: 1) improve aim: embed wind and angle sensors, possibly even battlefield intel (position, weather, land layout) to account for any drift that might impact the bullet. Also, auto-fire if a designated target is in the crosshair (train the AI on human faces, combine with the previous sensoring). I would not be surprised if this technology will be developed rather sooner than later with armed robots, and then made smaller until it fits in a gun or at least a rifle. 2) improve/rethink propulsion. Right now almost all guns operate by some form of bullet in a casing with explosive propellant (excluding the rare caseless guns and co2/pressured gas sports guns). Railguns are already a thing at "ship scale", it will be only a matter of time until it gets scaled down to hand-held guns. 3) improve projectiles. Right now bullets are dumb pieces of metal. Why not have active bullets (e.g. subminiature rockets) or bullets laced with poisons so that even a scrape kills in the end? 4) improve... guns themselves, as a concept - think laser guns a la Star Trek, highly focused microwave, sound or other energy. In the end humanity will always improve ways to kill each other, and all the concepts are already there in sci-fi (and in the case of poison bullets, the Russians made it a reality with the Markov murder).
- philsnow 6y ago
  > (only a '>98% accuracy' note). So let's talk about this a little bit: is "accuracy" what we want? Probably not---I don't care if I get accidentally notified, but I care very much if I don't get notified when the baby is crying Presumably this is 98% accuracy per sample or something, not per session of crying. I wouldn't want to leave my kid completely unanswered 1/50th of the time if he actually needed me, but I think with the model as trained, regular crying would eventually get noticed and that's fine with me. Somewhere else on the thread though somebody else called out the real downside of this model: it overfits on regular crying. Kids make all kinds of noises. Mine made a completely different, eldritch noise one time when he noticed a spider, for instance.
  - hellepardo 6y ago
    > the real downside of this model: it overfits on regular crying I'm with you there, that's a big downside too, but that's not the "real" downside---there are like seven different downsides present with the data science going on here and it's hard for me to say which is the biggest issue, because they're all issues. Data science is not trivial!
- tcbawo 6y ago
  This reminds me of the home-built garage door opener that popped up here a few months ago. When it comes to safety devices, there are literally man-decades of expertise that has gone into these devices. It is never a good idea to rely on something you whip up yourself over the weekend or convince anyone else that they could.
- Tokkemon 6y ago
  Wonderful analysis.
semi-extrinsic 6y ago
I don't get it. We bought a baby monitor in 2012 that was probably $80 (Philips brand I think). It was based off the DECT standard that was developed for wireless landline phones, so range was around 1200ft line-of-sight, in practice you could go two stories down in our apartment building to visit friends and it would stay connected just fine. The baby unit was quite bulky and ran off wall power, but the parent unit was significantly smaller than a modern phone and had a loud speaker plus a really strong vibration mode. And if it lost the signal from the baby unit, it made a hell of a racket to let you know you were out of range. It also transmitted temperature. Can't say we ever had trouble with it running out of battery either. I mean, I get the appeal of hacking just as much as the next guy. But IMO it makes no sense to hack on something like a baby monitor, where there is very little to be gained over off-the-shelf products, and where the consequences of a hardware or software failure can be that your baby is left crying unattended for a long time. Go grab an ESP32 and some WS2813s to pimp your stroller instead, much more fun.
- redisman 6y ago
  I gotta say, you guys must own some giant houses if the monitor is the only way to tell the baby is up and crying.
  - 542458 6y ago
    In my experience it’s not so much about hearing the full blown crying, it’s about hearing the fussing that indicates that crying is imminent.
- kokey 6y ago
  In our case we have a non verbal autistic son and a video baby monitor is really useful since it's not like he can call out for us or tell us if he has a problem. I am busy replacing his with a raspberry pi based ones because I've had enough trouble with Nest having too much control over the device and changing the functionality without warning.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
lqet 6y ago
"Lavish attention on me and entertain me." ― Maggie Simpson via the baby translator https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Baby_translator https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Baby_translator That being said, every parent knows the "he/she has never cried like this" moment where your blood freezes and you rush to the child's bed. Seems hard to add this to the model in a reliable manner.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Please fill me in as a non-parent : what was actually up when the baby cried like that?
  - pdovy 6y ago
    Not the OP but you get tuned into this pretty quick going through the normal gamut of kid issues. The _worst_ cry I've heard our son do was when he had a double ear infection, it was immediately obvious from the shrill tone that he was in pain and needed to go the doctor. There is also a slightly less desperate one where he's stuck in something (usually leg/arm in the crib, not really stuck but can't yet reason out how to fix the problem).
    - zrail 6y ago
      Double. Oof. That’s no fun.
  - zrail 6y ago
    Very early on we switched from an audio monitor to a video monitor specifically so we could answer this question without panicked running across the house. It’s really hard to generalize what an alarm cry could mean. In my experience they were never anything outwardly physical. Both of our kids had alarm cries that we associated with waking up from dreams, for example.
  - alexchamberlain 6y ago
    I have a 6 month old going to sleep in my arms... worst cry was probably yesterday with his biggest ever, smelliest poo. The joys of weining.
ponker 6y ago
One of the extremely important things with any DIY project related to your baby is KEEP THE WIRES SECURED AND AWAY FROM THE CRIB.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Or just don't.
  - ponker 6y ago
    If you're not certain about your setup, yes, avoid doing anything. I have a Bluetooth speaker in the crib to play white noise for our baby. It's a ruggedized speaker secured to the crib with 150-pound zip ties, and we charge it when the baby's not in it and remove the charging cord entirely while the baby's in there.
rich_sasha 6y ago
Other comments notwithstanding: how does a new parent find time for this???
- segmondy 6y ago
  You have less time, but you learn to organize and structure your time better. You also realize that if all you do is carry the baby, feed the baby and change diaper you will lose your mind, so you begin to find ways to push out work in 15-30mins increments. At least that's my story. :-D
  - rich_sasha 6y ago
    Lucky you. Baby #1 required beyond constant attention, literally like 30hr per day (healthy just needy). Baby #2 is sweet and easygoing, but then there’s 2 of them...
    - mattlondon 6y ago
      Agreed. We found Baby #1 to at times be a full-time job for two people in the first couple of months. Down-time is precious precious precious. Either catch up on sleep, or relax as best you can. For me personally, consumption has largely taken over from creation which I am not sure how I feel about but its working so far :-)
      - bipson 6y ago
        You feel OK for now. There might be depression and increasing anger, once you realise the kid is still needy and your partner is now occupied with #2. On a more serious note, for me consumption at this point in my life is a vicious cycle that does not make me a happier or better person - yet the circumstances keep pushing me towards it.
    - knicholes 6y ago
      I have compassion for your experience having two of my own where one still is difficult after seven years, but I'm here to nitpick and win the pedantry award on your addition of "literally" when it's impossible to take 30 hours per day, as a day is only 24.
alexchamberlain 6y ago
This is clearly an awesome project... for those with slightly less time and/or don't want to label their baby's cries, Motorola produce a range of WiFi connected baby monitors that have a lot (but admittedly not all) the required features.
fibbery 6y ago
An old Android tablet or phone with the app Dormi does great, too. The best part is that it doesn't make any noise until there's sustained noise detected in the baby room. It also alerts if it loses connectivity and can be snoozed at 10 minute intervals.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Does the battery hold up to the level of abuse?
ashika 6y ago
game changer if it could also smell poop!
- mattlondon 6y ago
  I actually wondered about this. Could any of the various "VOC Sensors" that you can get from sparkfun/adafruit etc actually be used to detect the smell?
  - hnthrowaway353 6y ago
    We have an Arlo baby monitor with a VOC sensor and I'd say the probability of detection is ~80% but the false alarm rate is ~50%
  - rwiggum 6y ago
    I can say from personal experience that they can detect farts, but only really stinky ones.
mattlondon 6y ago
This is great and all, but it has to be 100% utterly completely reliable with no false-negatives. If it doesn't tell you (i.e. false negative) even once, then you can guarantee that it will never be trusted ever again, especially by the birth parent. We've gone through a range of frankly awful monitors and cameras that simply were not reliable. E.g. cameras that would regularly go offline for maintenance between 3am & 4am (precisely when you need it...), or cameras that would freeze and show you a sweetly sleeping silent baby that turned out to be simply a frozen frame from 45 minutes previously etc and the live stream had failed, cameras that would lose wifi for no reason that required intricate sequences of button-holding-down-for-x-seconds-then-tapping-then-releasing-etc (not great when you've had about 30 minutes of sleep over the past 36 hours), app-connected things with awful apps that crash or don't quite work right unless you do things in the exact right order etc. We even ended up with a digital clock in-frame for a while so when we looked at the video we could tell if it was "live" or not... this is how unreliable a lot of baby monitors you find on amazon or high street retail. Once these things fail you once, they cannot be trusted again. Ever. Perhaps me and my wife are just ultra neurotic, but there you go. We ended up with a fairly reliable set up for multiple redundancy that seems to work: - a DECT-based monitor from BT that actually does detect cries (you can entirely mute the intercom but it will audibly-beep and flash a warning if it hears a cry - also does temperature read outs and alerts). 100% ultra bullet-proof reliability so far. - a Google Nest camera (only camera we found that has been acceptable in terms of reliability & non-shonky app - it does mysteriously "go offline" from time to time, but it sends a notification & and email as well as the app being clear it is offline, and usually recovers on its own fairly quickly). Expensive compared to other options (and not specifically a "baby monitor") but worth it I think (we do not pay for the subscription though) - an "Owlet" heart-rate and oxygen sensor (although this has poor hardware reliability - the charging port physically crumbles and the "sock" that the sensor goes into is easily moved to a bad position by the baby squirming around.... although the fail-safe there is that it will alert if this happens).
- david-gpu 6y ago
  Have you considered therapy? Not just to provide support for your mental health, but also the (future) mental health of your child. I mean this from a place of kindness and compassion. As a father of two, I can't imagine going through multiple baby monitors and eventually settling on a three-device redundant sensor array that sounds like it belongs more in a NICU rather than in a home.
hyko 6y ago
No thank you. Baby monitors should not be connected to the internet, rely on machine learning to make decisions for you, or rely on push notifications to gain your attention. Keep them simple, local, reliable, and dumb AF. In this use case, less is most definitely more.
- i_love_music 6y ago
  Thanks. This is just a hard no immediately. Not only for the health of the child, but does ML have to be the solution for everything? I think a Rube Goldberg machine would be more reliable than this.
- leoedin 6y ago
  I ended up getting a simple video monitor from BT that is an "appliance" - it's not got a wifi connection or an app. It works great! And it'll keep working until we don't need it. No software updates, no discontinued support, no questionable data storage policies on chinese servers. Just a monitor. And it turns out that once the baby's passed ~4 months, the video isn't too important anyway. It's mostly "Is he crying or not".
  - stephenhuey 6y ago
    Exactly, my #1 criteria for a baby monitor was that it does not connect to the internet! Maybe not enough parents have heard how people hack home networks and terrorize children through cameras.
- fma 6y ago
  I received a hand me down Motorola baby monitor + camera. It doesn't connect to the Internet. It'll beep if the camera is disconnected. The monitor has power save capability (video feed off, sound on), let me know if power is low....It has everything I need. I just needed to replace the battery for a very cheap price because the charge didn't hold as long.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Baby monitors should not be connected to the internet This one connects to the network, not necessarily to the internet. (the latter is up to you)
marmaduke 6y ago
Does anyone else just, you know, watch the baby or stay near enough to hear them when they go off? We didn’t have any clever stuff for our kids and it was tiring but ok (both full time jobs, no family to help us)
- r00fus 6y ago
  Cosleeping is what we did for our twins until they were about 1y old. They've turned out fine. I mean, what did pre-tech societies do?
  - marmaduke 6y ago
    Yep, I think sometimes working in tech can bite back along the “medium is the message” lines. In engineering sure tech is the answer. With kids it’s not always so.
kokey 6y ago
Actually this would be useful for something I've been wanting to set up. I want a white noise generator in my older kid's room to fade in and out when the baby is crying, since the baby's crying keeps the other kid awake.
jon-wood 6y ago
Please, please, do not use something like this as the only method of monitoring a child’s safety. This sort of thing has given me honest to god nightmares. My day job is managing development and infrastructure of internet connected cameras, with motion detection, notifications, and all the rest of it. Every now and again someone new will start on the marketing team and put together something about using them as baby monitors, swiftly followed by the engineering team descending on them to explain there’s no way we can guarantee sufficient reliability for something where the worst case failure mode is someone’s baby dying. If you’re going to insist on something like this you need to be absolutely sure that you have sufficient monitoring in place. If it loses video from the camera, it needs to alert. If it loses its network connection, it needs to alert. If whatever is meant to be receiving alerts doesn’t receive a heartbeat from the camera, it needs to alert. In all those cases that alert needs to be obnoxious as hell, and guaranteed to fire. And the machine learning just needs to go away, unless somehow you’ve obtained video of every way in which a child can end up seriously injured, from multiple angles, with which to train it.
- glouwbug 6y ago
  So what you're saying is, to save a baby we gotta hurt a baby
  - Xorlev 6y ago
    I know this was intended to be a joke, but it didn't really land with me.
- rubidium 6y ago
  A baby monitor is to detect if a baby is crying not if a baby is dying. It seems like your exaggerating the user need (system engineer in HW+ SW and father of 3 here). Most use cases for baby monitors are “im relatively nearby, but want to hear if the kiddo’s waking up”. This solution is great.
  - caymanjim 6y ago
    I don't even know anyone who uses a baby monitor. I think we can get by. If someone relies on one to the exclusion of actually checking on their child from time to time, the failure of the monitor is probably the least of risks.
hikerclimb 6y ago
Hopefully this fails for someone and the baby dies...
hikerclimb 6y ago
Hopefully this fails for someone and the baby dies.
jonny383 6y ago
Sorry, but some things simply shouldn't have technology applied to them at this level. If author is so worried about trying to "automate" away parenting duties, I think they should take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror and seriously reconsider their approach to parenting. There's no amount of RaspberryPi or Tensorflow to justify reducing parenting time so you can do more RaspberryPi or Tensorflow-ing.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  The tone isn't great, but I think it's in part like that because they're trying to pitch their project as automation. To me it seems more replacing/extending something (analog baby monitor), but that's not exactly automation. It’s up to the parent to move the speaker as they move to different rooms, as they can’t play the sound on any other existing audio infrastructure
rocketcity 6y ago
Came here to post basically the same comment as everyone else, so I’ll save my words. My child was born in June and we have been using a WYze camera with RTSP enabled + a kindle tablet with TinyCam installed and it has worked flawlessly. Highly recommend for a budget setup.
- rubidium 6y ago
  I recommend a simple audio one. Video is unnecessary. It’s easier to hand off to babysitters, “just works”, and honestly your kids not gonna die because you dont have a 24/7 video feed of them. Just make sure the bed they’re in is the right kind (nothing to get tangled or entrapped in).
  - TT3351 6y ago
    This camera stuff scares me
geocrasher 6y ago
I don't have a baby, but I might have the need for a baby monitor. A sick family member who needs help sometimes in the middle of the night. Training TensorFlow to hear her yell "Help!" isn't going to do the job. For now, she reaches over to her phone, presses the home button, and says "Hey Google, call $familymember". It works, unless she can't reach her phone for any reason. I had looked at this article wondering to see if it could be a valid replacement, but instead it's a very hopeful hobby project that I wouldn't trust anyone's safety to. It's definitely cool, but I think it's more suited for identifying a barking dog or a meowing kitten than a Human In Need, baby or otherwise.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Why don't you put a shortcut the home screen to call you directly?
  - geocrasher 6y ago
    It's a good idea. The main problem however is touch. That's why we went to voice activation. If she could unlock it, she could call and wouldn't need voice activation.
m463 6y ago
all these comments. bah. Sounds like you need 3 devices. One windows, one linux and one possibly off-the-shelf version that is UL listed. They should each have cellular, radio and wifi connectivity, and battery backup. Also: https://amzn.com/B00NL5JPZC https://amzn.com/B00NL5JPZC and maybe https://amzn.com/B07CRHWBSJ https://amzn.com/B07CRHWBSJ
dschol 6y ago
Awesome post. If you’re feeling too lazy to build this and are willing to throw money at the problem, check out Nanit. It’s an amazing baby cam that can detect sleeping and breathing. It works like a charm. Our family loves it.
Tokkemon 6y ago
As a father with a toddler at home, we use the baby monitor as a dumb radio in case we can't hear his cries through the walls. (We usually can, he's loud when he wants to be heard.) I wouldn't want any other features because I'm the parent, not the dumb radio.
- Tokkemon 6y ago
  Also, the line about notifying on your phone if your baby is crying really, really struck me the wrong way. Like, you need your phone to tell you if your own flesh and blood is in distress? Come on man, be a better parent than that.
pugio 6y ago
There's a lot of negativity in these comments, but I'm excited because I'm working on exactly the same thing. I have a raspberry pi 4 hooked up to a PS3 eye camera/mic, and have been tweaking it to only forward audio when my child cries. I wasn't going to start with ML - just send the audio if it was over a certain threshold for a certain amount of time (say, 5 or 10 seconds of noise that's above the normal ambient background for that room). For everyone chiming in about how this is terrible parenting, I know it comes from a place of concern, but I personally am not worried about using this, and I can imagine that the author of the article is probably thinking similarly to me. I would not use this monitor in a situation where the health of my baby was in any way suspect. My baby tends to make lots of noise at night - shifting around, sighing to herself, and occasionally uttering a single piercing wail for absolutely no reason for just one second (sounds like an audio hardware test, just the brain exercising the circuitry during sleep). While none of this bothers the baby, I am a very sensitive sleeper and having her in my room is completely destroying my sleep. I'm going to use this to be able to move her to another room. It's a room adjacent to mine. It's close enough that if she works herself up to her full volume I'm sure I would still wake up and hear her. This is so I can filter out her background noise, but still respond to her night wakeup crying without having her reach her full protesting volume. I think it's nicer for her that way. It is not dangerous; just a means for me to get some more sleep while still being able to respond promptly when she wakes up.
- runesoerensen 6y ago
  > I wasn't going to start with ML - just send the audio if it was over a certain threshold for a certain amount of time (say, 5 or 10 seconds of noise that's above the normal ambient background for that room). In my experience this might very well be sufficient. I have a baby monitor (eufy spaceview) that does just that, and as long as you can set a volume threshold to account for expected noise (e.g. a white noise device) I doubt an ML-powered version will add much value for this use case. I also have an eufy Indoor Security Cam, which does some more intelligent audio processing, such as detecting when someone is crying, and is able to send notifications based on those alerts. It has worked flawlessly in my experience, but also hasn't provided additional value over the baby monitor that only detects noise over a certain volume. In the end it doesn't really matter what kind of excessive noise you're hearing from your baby's room. If its loud enough to trigger our baby monitor I'd like an alert even if it doesn't sound like crying. The security camera we have also doesn't trigger an alarm (on Apple devices, besides from the notification sound), so that's another thing to take in to consideration.
jsilence 6y ago
I see a lot of potential of this for other fields. For example coughing detection in pig husbandry. So while I am a little wary about the baby monitoring, I am very grateful for the project and its documentation. Thank you!
jsilence 6y ago
One could use the free software Subtitle Edit [1] for the labeling of the audio. Output would be in SRT format, but a conversion to the required JSON should be trivial. [1] https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit/ https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit/
kstenerud 6y ago
Ding Ding! All aboard the HN negativity train! Seriously, I don't remember HN being this bad before. Is it that the pandemic has everyone in a perpetually bad mood? It would be interesting to do a sentiment analysis over the past couple of years to find out!
krzyk 6y ago
This is exactly the article I come to Hacker News for. I recently started thinking of learning more about ML and here it is, exactly what I needed (I have a baby), or maybe not what I need, but what I can use for fun (I mostly hear when my baby is crying).

179 points by sebg 6y ago

So, don't get me wrong. This is a fun project and a neat little device. I don't mean to take away from it in any way. However it is really important to consider why baby monitors are so primitive: because the cost of a false negative is huge. I didn't see any mention of this in the author's experiments (only a '>98% accuracy' note). So let's talk about this a little bit: is "accuracy" what we want? Probably not---I don't care if I get accidentally notified, but I care very much if I don't get notified when the baby is crying. So you want to weight your classifier's predictions heavily against false negatives (at the price of false positives). It would be good to make an ROC curve to characterize this behavior. More importantly though, any predictive model assumes a stationary distribution; i.e., training conditions accurately reflect test conditions. But will they in real life? What about when your neighbor's house is under construction? Can interference from chainsaws cause the model to fail to detect the baby crying? What about the dude down the street with his super loud motorcycle? What happens then? I bet the training set doesn't have situations like this. I really, really don't want to come off like a wet blanket here. But I feel obligated to, because this is a model that directly impacts the welfare of a human, and so we should at least talk about or discuss potential drawbacks. (Again, cool weekend project, just, we need to be clear about the implications of outsourcing the decision of whether the baby is crying to a black-box model where we can't interpret what it's doing.)

lake_vincent 6y ago
Was going to come here to say something very similar. I'm no luddite, but some things really shouldn't be left to tech like this...
- siminm 6y ago
  Fearing the worst outcome ought to inspire you to make the tech better, not avoid it altogether.
  - devenblake 6y ago
    But the tech exists. It's not like we're using tin cans and string and trying to replace that with a gizmo; we have the gizmo, and now we're trying to make an open-source version of it. While the goal is admirable there's no real benefit from using a less-tested Raspberry Pi project. There are less risky ways to learn the same lessons - a video walky-talky maybe.
    - harperlee 6y ago
      As a father, I generally agree with what you both are saying regarding being conservative with tech choices on delicate areas such as babies, but I‘d also add that 99% of situations of my baby making random noises (that also trigger a baby monitor) are not something that are going yo have an impact on the baby long term. Most times my baby has lost the pacifier in the dark, and finds it before I reach upstairs (or annoyingly, between me waking up, and me reaching my bedroom door). Also there’s the scary converse: some important things do not make a noise, such as a baby suffocating in her sleep.
- rhacker 6y ago
  Maybe not this specifically but a similar tech should be considered to detect babies in hot cars.
  - scruple 6y ago
    Automobile manufacturers are doing this now, IIRC. With sensors on the seats to remind you that you put something heavy into the car.
    - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
      Hmm, I don't think so - seat sensors are used to enable / disable passenger airbags, my memory is that they only register weights over 40lb / 18kg.
      - scruple 6y ago
        > In 2016, General Motors took the lead among automotive manufacturers by introducing the Rear Seat Reminder, a technology designed to nudge drivers to check their back seats as they exit their vehicles. It uses an audible alert and a front panel message to tell drivers to check the rear of their vehicle for occupants. > Rear Seat Reminder technology became standard on all new Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac four-door sedans, SUVs, and crossovers starting with the 2019 model year, and also will be standard on all 2020 model year GM pickup trucks, said GM spokesperson Phil Lienert. > Kia, Nissan, and Subaru offer rear-seat alert systems in many of their models, according to Car and Driver, and Hyundai announced on July 31 – National Heatstroke Day – that it planned to incorporate the technology across all models by 2022. One of Hyundai’s newest innovations is the Ultrasonic Rear Occupant Alert, in which a sensor can detect the presence of a child (or pet) and activates a loud horn if the driver leaves with the child inside. https://mashable.com/article/car-seat-alarms-prevent-hot-car-death/ https://mashable.com/article/car-seat-alarms-prevent-hot-car...
        blacksmith_tb 6y ago
        Interesting, though hard to see how that prevents people from leaving children and pets in the front seats...
mytailorisrich 6y ago
> So you want to weight your classifier's predictions heavily against false negatives (at the price of false positives). Which makes me think that a simple trigger based on ambient sound level probably does the job... I suspect that many baby monitors work that way. This also actually makes sense because I likely want to be alerted in case of noise in general rather than just cries, just in case.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I have to agree - I like tinkering and hacking as much as the next dev, and I don't like to be negative, but... what is the point of AI/ML here, where a simple sounds trigger works just fine? What problem is it actually solving - I only see this approach causing problems.
nicolashahn 6y ago
Forgive me for bringing it up, but this is also the reason why smart gun technology is a complete dead end.
- Grakel 6y ago
  I wonder if there are huge advances to be made in suppressor technology? Other than the noise, guns are basically perfect in their intended function. I guess you could try to further reduce recoil.
  - nicolashahn 6y ago
    If we could get a caseless ammo system to work I think that'd be pretty game changing. Lots of factors going against that though.
    - Grakel 6y ago
      Yes, that's a great point.
  - time0ut 6y ago
    There have been some pretty fascinating experimental weapons over the the years. For example, the H&K G11 [0] used caseless ammunition. The potential advantages of that are no need to eject a spent casing and a soldier can carry more of it since it weighs less. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_G11
    - Grakel 6y ago
      That would be a game changer for sure.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Oh, there's a lot more stuff that can be done to guns: 1) improve aim: embed wind and angle sensors, possibly even battlefield intel (position, weather, land layout) to account for any drift that might impact the bullet. Also, auto-fire if a designated target is in the crosshair (train the AI on human faces, combine with the previous sensoring). I would not be surprised if this technology will be developed rather sooner than later with armed robots, and then made smaller until it fits in a gun or at least a rifle. 2) improve/rethink propulsion. Right now almost all guns operate by some form of bullet in a casing with explosive propellant (excluding the rare caseless guns and co2/pressured gas sports guns). Railguns are already a thing at "ship scale", it will be only a matter of time until it gets scaled down to hand-held guns. 3) improve projectiles. Right now bullets are dumb pieces of metal. Why not have active bullets (e.g. subminiature rockets) or bullets laced with poisons so that even a scrape kills in the end? 4) improve... guns themselves, as a concept - think laser guns a la Star Trek, highly focused microwave, sound or other energy. In the end humanity will always improve ways to kill each other, and all the concepts are already there in sci-fi (and in the case of poison bullets, the Russians made it a reality with the Markov murder).
philsnow 6y ago
> (only a '>98% accuracy' note). So let's talk about this a little bit: is "accuracy" what we want? Probably not---I don't care if I get accidentally notified, but I care very much if I don't get notified when the baby is crying Presumably this is 98% accuracy per sample or something, not per session of crying. I wouldn't want to leave my kid completely unanswered 1/50th of the time if he actually needed me, but I think with the model as trained, regular crying would eventually get noticed and that's fine with me. Somewhere else on the thread though somebody else called out the real downside of this model: it overfits on regular crying. Kids make all kinds of noises. Mine made a completely different, eldritch noise one time when he noticed a spider, for instance.
- hellepardo 6y ago
  > the real downside of this model: it overfits on regular crying I'm with you there, that's a big downside too, but that's not the "real" downside---there are like seven different downsides present with the data science going on here and it's hard for me to say which is the biggest issue, because they're all issues. Data science is not trivial!
tcbawo 6y ago
This reminds me of the home-built garage door opener that popped up here a few months ago. When it comes to safety devices, there are literally man-decades of expertise that has gone into these devices. It is never a good idea to rely on something you whip up yourself over the weekend or convince anyone else that they could.
Tokkemon 6y ago
Wonderful analysis.

semi-extrinsic 6y ago

I don't get it. We bought a baby monitor in 2012 that was probably $80 (Philips brand I think). It was based off the DECT standard that was developed for wireless landline phones, so range was around 1200ft line-of-sight, in practice you could go two stories down in our apartment building to visit friends and it would stay connected just fine. The baby unit was quite bulky and ran off wall power, but the parent unit was significantly smaller than a modern phone and had a loud speaker plus a really strong vibration mode. And if it lost the signal from the baby unit, it made a hell of a racket to let you know you were out of range. It also transmitted temperature. Can't say we ever had trouble with it running out of battery either. I mean, I get the appeal of hacking just as much as the next guy. But IMO it makes no sense to hack on something like a baby monitor, where there is very little to be gained over off-the-shelf products, and where the consequences of a hardware or software failure can be that your baby is left crying unattended for a long time. Go grab an ESP32 and some WS2813s to pimp your stroller instead, much more fun.

redisman 6y ago
I gotta say, you guys must own some giant houses if the monitor is the only way to tell the baby is up and crying.
- 542458 6y ago
  In my experience it’s not so much about hearing the full blown crying, it’s about hearing the fussing that indicates that crying is imminent.
kokey 6y ago
In our case we have a non verbal autistic son and a video baby monitor is really useful since it's not like he can call out for us or tell us if he has a problem. I am busy replacing his with a raspberry pi based ones because I've had enough trouble with Nest having too much control over the device and changing the functionality without warning.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago

lqet 6y ago

"Lavish attention on me and entertain me." ― Maggie Simpson via the baby translator https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Baby_translator https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Baby_translator That being said, every parent knows the "he/she has never cried like this" moment where your blood freezes and you rush to the child's bed. Seems hard to add this to the model in a reliable manner.

the-dude 6y ago
Please fill me in as a non-parent : what was actually up when the baby cried like that?
- pdovy 6y ago
  Not the OP but you get tuned into this pretty quick going through the normal gamut of kid issues. The _worst_ cry I've heard our son do was when he had a double ear infection, it was immediately obvious from the shrill tone that he was in pain and needed to go the doctor. There is also a slightly less desperate one where he's stuck in something (usually leg/arm in the crib, not really stuck but can't yet reason out how to fix the problem).
  - zrail 6y ago
    Double. Oof. That’s no fun.
- zrail 6y ago
  Very early on we switched from an audio monitor to a video monitor specifically so we could answer this question without panicked running across the house. It’s really hard to generalize what an alarm cry could mean. In my experience they were never anything outwardly physical. Both of our kids had alarm cries that we associated with waking up from dreams, for example.
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  I have a 6 month old going to sleep in my arms... worst cry was probably yesterday with his biggest ever, smelliest poo. The joys of weining.

ponker 6y ago

One of the extremely important things with any DIY project related to your baby is KEEP THE WIRES SECURED AND AWAY FROM THE CRIB.

sitkack 6y ago
Or just don't.
- ponker 6y ago
  If you're not certain about your setup, yes, avoid doing anything. I have a Bluetooth speaker in the crib to play white noise for our baby. It's a ruggedized speaker secured to the crib with 150-pound zip ties, and we charge it when the baby's not in it and remove the charging cord entirely while the baby's in there.

rich_sasha 6y ago

Other comments notwithstanding: how does a new parent find time for this???

segmondy 6y ago
You have less time, but you learn to organize and structure your time better. You also realize that if all you do is carry the baby, feed the baby and change diaper you will lose your mind, so you begin to find ways to push out work in 15-30mins increments. At least that's my story. :-D
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  Lucky you. Baby #1 required beyond constant attention, literally like 30hr per day (healthy just needy). Baby #2 is sweet and easygoing, but then there’s 2 of them...
  - mattlondon 6y ago
    Agreed. We found Baby #1 to at times be a full-time job for two people in the first couple of months. Down-time is precious precious precious. Either catch up on sleep, or relax as best you can. For me personally, consumption has largely taken over from creation which I am not sure how I feel about but its working so far :-)
    - bipson 6y ago
      You feel OK for now. There might be depression and increasing anger, once you realise the kid is still needy and your partner is now occupied with #2. On a more serious note, for me consumption at this point in my life is a vicious cycle that does not make me a happier or better person - yet the circumstances keep pushing me towards it.
  - knicholes 6y ago
    I have compassion for your experience having two of my own where one still is difficult after seven years, but I'm here to nitpick and win the pedantry award on your addition of "literally" when it's impossible to take 30 hours per day, as a day is only 24.

alexchamberlain 6y ago

This is clearly an awesome project... for those with slightly less time and/or don't want to label their baby's cries, Motorola produce a range of WiFi connected baby monitors that have a lot (but admittedly not all) the required features.

fibbery 6y ago

An old Android tablet or phone with the app Dormi does great, too. The best part is that it doesn't make any noise until there's sustained noise detected in the baby room. It also alerts if it loses connectivity and can be snoozed at 10 minute intervals.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Does the battery hold up to the level of abuse?

ashika 6y ago

game changer if it could also smell poop!

mattlondon 6y ago
I actually wondered about this. Could any of the various "VOC Sensors" that you can get from sparkfun/adafruit etc actually be used to detect the smell?
- hnthrowaway353 6y ago
  We have an Arlo baby monitor with a VOC sensor and I'd say the probability of detection is ~80% but the false alarm rate is ~50%
- rwiggum 6y ago
  I can say from personal experience that they can detect farts, but only really stinky ones.

mattlondon 6y ago

This is great and all, but it has to be 100% utterly completely reliable with no false-negatives. If it doesn't tell you (i.e. false negative) even once, then you can guarantee that it will never be trusted ever again, especially by the birth parent. We've gone through a range of frankly awful monitors and cameras that simply were not reliable. E.g. cameras that would regularly go offline for maintenance between 3am & 4am (precisely when you need it...), or cameras that would freeze and show you a sweetly sleeping silent baby that turned out to be simply a frozen frame from 45 minutes previously etc and the live stream had failed, cameras that would lose wifi for no reason that required intricate sequences of button-holding-down-for-x-seconds-then-tapping-then-releasing-etc (not great when you've had about 30 minutes of sleep over the past 36 hours), app-connected things with awful apps that crash or don't quite work right unless you do things in the exact right order etc. We even ended up with a digital clock in-frame for a while so when we looked at the video we could tell if it was "live" or not... this is how unreliable a lot of baby monitors you find on amazon or high street retail. Once these things fail you once, they cannot be trusted again. Ever. Perhaps me and my wife are just ultra neurotic, but there you go. We ended up with a fairly reliable set up for multiple redundancy that seems to work: - a DECT-based monitor from BT that actually does detect cries (you can entirely mute the intercom but it will audibly-beep and flash a warning if it hears a cry - also does temperature read outs and alerts). 100% ultra bullet-proof reliability so far. - a Google Nest camera (only camera we found that has been acceptable in terms of reliability & non-shonky app - it does mysteriously "go offline" from time to time, but it sends a notification & and email as well as the app being clear it is offline, and usually recovers on its own fairly quickly). Expensive compared to other options (and not specifically a "baby monitor") but worth it I think (we do not pay for the subscription though) - an "Owlet" heart-rate and oxygen sensor (although this has poor hardware reliability - the charging port physically crumbles and the "sock" that the sensor goes into is easily moved to a bad position by the baby squirming around.... although the fail-safe there is that it will alert if this happens).

david-gpu 6y ago
Have you considered therapy? Not just to provide support for your mental health, but also the (future) mental health of your child. I mean this from a place of kindness and compassion. As a father of two, I can't imagine going through multiple baby monitors and eventually settling on a three-device redundant sensor array that sounds like it belongs more in a NICU rather than in a home.

hyko 6y ago

No thank you. Baby monitors should not be connected to the internet, rely on machine learning to make decisions for you, or rely on push notifications to gain your attention. Keep them simple, local, reliable, and dumb AF. In this use case, less is most definitely more.

i_love_music 6y ago
Thanks. This is just a hard no immediately. Not only for the health of the child, but does ML have to be the solution for everything? I think a Rube Goldberg machine would be more reliable than this.
leoedin 6y ago
I ended up getting a simple video monitor from BT that is an "appliance" - it's not got a wifi connection or an app. It works great! And it'll keep working until we don't need it. No software updates, no discontinued support, no questionable data storage policies on chinese servers. Just a monitor. And it turns out that once the baby's passed ~4 months, the video isn't too important anyway. It's mostly "Is he crying or not".
- stephenhuey 6y ago
  Exactly, my #1 criteria for a baby monitor was that it does not connect to the internet! Maybe not enough parents have heard how people hack home networks and terrorize children through cameras.
fma 6y ago
I received a hand me down Motorola baby monitor + camera. It doesn't connect to the Internet. It'll beep if the camera is disconnected. The monitor has power save capability (video feed off, sound on), let me know if power is low....It has everything I need. I just needed to replace the battery for a very cheap price because the charge didn't hold as long.
viraptor 6y ago
> Baby monitors should not be connected to the internet This one connects to the network, not necessarily to the internet. (the latter is up to you)

marmaduke 6y ago

Does anyone else just, you know, watch the baby or stay near enough to hear them when they go off? We didn’t have any clever stuff for our kids and it was tiring but ok (both full time jobs, no family to help us)

r00fus 6y ago
Cosleeping is what we did for our twins until they were about 1y old. They've turned out fine. I mean, what did pre-tech societies do?
- marmaduke 6y ago
  Yep, I think sometimes working in tech can bite back along the “medium is the message” lines. In engineering sure tech is the answer. With kids it’s not always so.

kokey 6y ago

Actually this would be useful for something I've been wanting to set up. I want a white noise generator in my older kid's room to fade in and out when the baby is crying, since the baby's crying keeps the other kid awake.

jon-wood 6y ago

Please, please, do not use something like this as the only method of monitoring a child’s safety. This sort of thing has given me honest to god nightmares. My day job is managing development and infrastructure of internet connected cameras, with motion detection, notifications, and all the rest of it. Every now and again someone new will start on the marketing team and put together something about using them as baby monitors, swiftly followed by the engineering team descending on them to explain there’s no way we can guarantee sufficient reliability for something where the worst case failure mode is someone’s baby dying. If you’re going to insist on something like this you need to be absolutely sure that you have sufficient monitoring in place. If it loses video from the camera, it needs to alert. If it loses its network connection, it needs to alert. If whatever is meant to be receiving alerts doesn’t receive a heartbeat from the camera, it needs to alert. In all those cases that alert needs to be obnoxious as hell, and guaranteed to fire. And the machine learning just needs to go away, unless somehow you’ve obtained video of every way in which a child can end up seriously injured, from multiple angles, with which to train it.

glouwbug 6y ago
So what you're saying is, to save a baby we gotta hurt a baby
- Xorlev 6y ago
  I know this was intended to be a joke, but it didn't really land with me.
rubidium 6y ago
A baby monitor is to detect if a baby is crying not if a baby is dying. It seems like your exaggerating the user need (system engineer in HW+ SW and father of 3 here). Most use cases for baby monitors are “im relatively nearby, but want to hear if the kiddo’s waking up”. This solution is great.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  I don't even know anyone who uses a baby monitor. I think we can get by. If someone relies on one to the exclusion of actually checking on their child from time to time, the failure of the monitor is probably the least of risks.

hikerclimb 6y ago

Hopefully this fails for someone and the baby dies...

hikerclimb 6y ago

Hopefully this fails for someone and the baby dies.

jonny383 6y ago

Sorry, but some things simply shouldn't have technology applied to them at this level. If author is so worried about trying to "automate" away parenting duties, I think they should take a good hard look at themselves in the mirror and seriously reconsider their approach to parenting. There's no amount of RaspberryPi or Tensorflow to justify reducing parenting time so you can do more RaspberryPi or Tensorflow-ing.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
The tone isn't great, but I think it's in part like that because they're trying to pitch their project as automation. To me it seems more replacing/extending something (analog baby monitor), but that's not exactly automation. It’s up to the parent to move the speaker as they move to different rooms, as they can’t play the sound on any other existing audio infrastructure

rocketcity 6y ago

Came here to post basically the same comment as everyone else, so I’ll save my words. My child was born in June and we have been using a WYze camera with RTSP enabled + a kindle tablet with TinyCam installed and it has worked flawlessly. Highly recommend for a budget setup.

rubidium 6y ago
I recommend a simple audio one. Video is unnecessary. It’s easier to hand off to babysitters, “just works”, and honestly your kids not gonna die because you dont have a 24/7 video feed of them. Just make sure the bed they’re in is the right kind (nothing to get tangled or entrapped in).
- TT3351 6y ago
  This camera stuff scares me

geocrasher 6y ago

I don't have a baby, but I might have the need for a baby monitor. A sick family member who needs help sometimes in the middle of the night. Training TensorFlow to hear her yell "Help!" isn't going to do the job. For now, she reaches over to her phone, presses the home button, and says "Hey Google, call $familymember". It works, unless she can't reach her phone for any reason. I had looked at this article wondering to see if it could be a valid replacement, but instead it's a very hopeful hobby project that I wouldn't trust anyone's safety to. It's definitely cool, but I think it's more suited for identifying a barking dog or a meowing kitten than a Human In Need, baby or otherwise.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Why don't you put a shortcut the home screen to call you directly?
- geocrasher 6y ago
  It's a good idea. The main problem however is touch. That's why we went to voice activation. If she could unlock it, she could call and wouldn't need voice activation.

m463 6y ago

all these comments. bah. Sounds like you need 3 devices. One windows, one linux and one possibly off-the-shelf version that is UL listed. They should each have cellular, radio and wifi connectivity, and battery backup. Also: https://amzn.com/B00NL5JPZC https://amzn.com/B00NL5JPZC and maybe https://amzn.com/B07CRHWBSJ https://amzn.com/B07CRHWBSJ

dschol 6y ago

Awesome post. If you’re feeling too lazy to build this and are willing to throw money at the problem, check out Nanit. It’s an amazing baby cam that can detect sleeping and breathing. It works like a charm. Our family loves it.

Tokkemon 6y ago

As a father with a toddler at home, we use the baby monitor as a dumb radio in case we can't hear his cries through the walls. (We usually can, he's loud when he wants to be heard.) I wouldn't want any other features because I'm the parent, not the dumb radio.

Tokkemon 6y ago
Also, the line about notifying on your phone if your baby is crying really, really struck me the wrong way. Like, you need your phone to tell you if your own flesh and blood is in distress? Come on man, be a better parent than that.

pugio 6y ago

There's a lot of negativity in these comments, but I'm excited because I'm working on exactly the same thing. I have a raspberry pi 4 hooked up to a PS3 eye camera/mic, and have been tweaking it to only forward audio when my child cries. I wasn't going to start with ML - just send the audio if it was over a certain threshold for a certain amount of time (say, 5 or 10 seconds of noise that's above the normal ambient background for that room). For everyone chiming in about how this is terrible parenting, I know it comes from a place of concern, but I personally am not worried about using this, and I can imagine that the author of the article is probably thinking similarly to me. I would not use this monitor in a situation where the health of my baby was in any way suspect. My baby tends to make lots of noise at night - shifting around, sighing to herself, and occasionally uttering a single piercing wail for absolutely no reason for just one second (sounds like an audio hardware test, just the brain exercising the circuitry during sleep). While none of this bothers the baby, I am a very sensitive sleeper and having her in my room is completely destroying my sleep. I'm going to use this to be able to move her to another room. It's a room adjacent to mine. It's close enough that if she works herself up to her full volume I'm sure I would still wake up and hear her. This is so I can filter out her background noise, but still respond to her night wakeup crying without having her reach her full protesting volume. I think it's nicer for her that way. It is not dangerous; just a means for me to get some more sleep while still being able to respond promptly when she wakes up.

runesoerensen 6y ago
> I wasn't going to start with ML - just send the audio if it was over a certain threshold for a certain amount of time (say, 5 or 10 seconds of noise that's above the normal ambient background for that room). In my experience this might very well be sufficient. I have a baby monitor (eufy spaceview) that does just that, and as long as you can set a volume threshold to account for expected noise (e.g. a white noise device) I doubt an ML-powered version will add much value for this use case. I also have an eufy Indoor Security Cam, which does some more intelligent audio processing, such as detecting when someone is crying, and is able to send notifications based on those alerts. It has worked flawlessly in my experience, but also hasn't provided additional value over the baby monitor that only detects noise over a certain volume. In the end it doesn't really matter what kind of excessive noise you're hearing from your baby's room. If its loud enough to trigger our baby monitor I'd like an alert even if it doesn't sound like crying. The security camera we have also doesn't trigger an alarm (on Apple devices, besides from the notification sound), so that's another thing to take in to consideration.

jsilence 6y ago

I see a lot of potential of this for other fields. For example coughing detection in pig husbandry. So while I am a little wary about the baby monitoring, I am very grateful for the project and its documentation. Thank you!

jsilence 6y ago

One could use the free software Subtitle Edit [1] for the labeling of the audio. Output would be in SRT format, but a conversion to the required JSON should be trivial. [1] https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit/ https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit/

kstenerud 6y ago

Ding Ding! All aboard the HN negativity train! Seriously, I don't remember HN being this bad before. Is it that the pandemic has everyone in a perpetually bad mood? It would be interesting to do a sentiment analysis over the past couple of years to find out!

krzyk 6y ago

This is exactly the article I come to Hacker News for. I recently started thinking of learning more about ML and here it is, exactly what I needed (I have a baby), or maybe not what I need, but what I can use for fun (I mostly hear when my baby is crying).