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To help prevent SIDS, I highly highly recommend a product called the Owlet Smart Sock. It was discontinued due to not being FDA approved but it is still availa
by upwardbound 4y ago
To help prevent SIDS, I highly highly recommend a product called the Owlet Smart Sock. It was discontinued due to not being FDA approved but it is still available on eBay and it is a potential lifesaver. What it does is that it's a pulse oximeter that sounds an alarm if your baby stops breathing or their blood oxygen falls below a threshold. This device potentially saved the life of one of our kids and I cannot recommend it enough. Our baby had fallen into a too deep sleep and though he looked peaceful his blood oxygen was very low and we had to aggressively wake him up to get him to start breathing again.
The product I am talking about is NOT the Owlet Dream Sock. That version is useless for this purpose. You need the now-discontinued Owlet Smart Sock, of which the most recent version was version 3. I believe the app is no longer available in the app store, and you need the app to use it, but I think if you have an Android device you can probably find an APK on one of the APK mirror sites. Personally, I have the iOS app which I still have due to having installed it on my phone before it was discontinued.
I hope someone will make an open-source product like this. It's conceptually quite simple: connect a pulse oximeter to a loud audible alarm. I would also love to be able to get an adult version as well for my grandparents that would call 911 automatically if they stop breathing or their heart stops. Calling 911 automatically would not be allowed in a product I think, but it could be done in an open-source / open-hardware product where the builder of the kit takes on the liability of breaking the 911-related laws (which in my view is a tiny price to pay for saving a loved one's life).
If any hardware hackers are looking for project ideas, an open version of the Owlet Smart Sock would be an incredible thing to build for the world.
P.S. my pet theory for what causes SIDS is that the part of the brain stem that controls breathing needs time to develop, and when the brain is super young that part of the brain is not yet fully developed, and is susceptible to failing to do its job. I think of an analogy to how people can die of failing to breathe during a heroin overdose, wherein that same part of the brain is put into a state where it doesn't maintain a high enough breathing rate. I suspect the failure mechanism in the overdose situation and the SIDS situation might be analogous.
- OrangeMonkey 4y agoThanks for the product rec. Does this work via bluetooth or did they somehow keep the servers on?
- upwardbound 4y agoThey somehow kept the servers on; the app gives you push notifications when there is an alarm, even if you are not home.
- dotancohen 4y agoI just ordered a MAX30102 module to test with. You are invited to contact me, my Gmail username is the same as my HN username.
- upwardbound 4y agoNice!!
- nxmnxm99 4y agoWasn't the Owlet discontinued because of multiple reported false negatives?
- aljungberg 4y agoMeaning it failed to detect a drop in oxygenation? Unless it fails 100% of the time, it would still be useful since “alerts on some non-zero percentage of life threatening conditions” is better than the alternative which is no alerts at all. We had one and I think it made one or two false positives where basically it fell off. I can’t say anything about false negatives since none of our children stopped breathing. (It had two alerts, one for losing skin contact and one for low oxygen. The first one we got all the time when forgetting to pause the base station before removing the sock, so that bit certainly worked.)