Caring for little ones has never been easier, what with the proliferation of gadgets designed with them in mind. From an alarm that wakes you when baby is wetting himself or herself to one that reminds you of the important things in his or her life, such as the date for the next immunisation, to one that keeps track of expressed milk supply, parents are spoilt for choice.
Twitter indicates that the most talked about people in Kenya between August 3 and 4 were three toddlers who featured on an NTV documentary. It says the hash-tag #JubileeBabies was all the rage on the two days the report ran.
The story tracked the life of three children born and raised in different backgrounds from birth through to their first birthdays. One was born to a middle-income couple, another one to a family living in a slum, and the third to homeless parents.
As Kenyans were “tweeting” their reactions about the class disparity and the hassles of bringing up children in each social stratum, DN2 was sifting through the technologies so far developed to help parents care for their young ones. Here is a rundown.
Did you know there is a device designed to wake up a parent when their child is bedwetting? The most advanced machines in this league make use of wireless technology.
You attach a device the size of a pen cap to your child’s nappy, and when they wet themselves, another device close to your bed alerts you.
The alarm, which can cost up to Sh10,000, can also awaken older children so they can dash to the washroom before they empty their bladder on the bedding. Our online search did not, however, find any traders who have listed such alarms in Kenya.
Does your child often act up when they should be asleep? A software developing company has come up with a mobile phone app that creates “monotony”.
With a phone running on Android version 2.1 upwards, you can use the app, named Sleep Baby Instant, to generate a variety of sounds that the developers say are certain to induce sleep in the young troublemaker.
“It can help your baby fall asleep using classic, monotonous, low-frequency sounds proven to be effective by generations of parents,” claim the application’s marketers.
They say the app can produce many sounds such as that of a car, a shower, a stream, and a fan.
Some 4,273 people have given the free app an average rating of 4.5 out of five stars on Google’s app store, an indication that its creators were not sleeping on the job.
The app is an adaptation of sleep machines that are used to play “white noise” to soothe children to sleep.
Still on mobile apps, code writers have come up with software that reminds a parent of all the important aspects of a baby’s life: when to feed them, what time they should be taking a nap, which milestones they have achieved.
Instead of the traditional diary recording of children’s progress, the application, named Baby Connect, offers a virtual platform for logging a child’s development from the day they are born.
Using a phone or computer, a parent enters the child’s details and the Sh500 app generates a series of reminders on when the child should be taken for immunisation, when to record the baby’s height, and a host of other provisions.
Pumping breast milk for later consumption by a child is a common practice among mothers, but are you unable to manage the whole pumping routine because you extract it into multiple bottles? Well, you need an iPhone or an iPad.
With those, you can install an app named Milk Maid, which will help you to calculate how much milk you expressed, how much is in the freezer, how much stock you will need to leave behind before a business trip.
“Milk Maid keeps track of individual bottles and bags by pumping date so that you can use the oldest milk first,” the makers of the Sh300 app say.
When a child is old enough to move around, a parent’s greatest worry is what he is up to with their itchy fingers.
To free themselves from such worries, parents with Apple devices can get the iBaby M3S Baby Monitor, a CCTV camera-like device that can be placed at one point in a room and rotated remotely by a phone or computer.
In addition to communicating your child’s cry to you if you are very far away, the Sh17,000 gadget also responds to the youngster’s cry by playing your pre-recorded voice to let them know you are aware of their distress and are sympathetic.
“Enjoy peace of mind knowing that your baby’s movement or cry activates an alert to you, while two-way audio capability carries your soothing voice when it is needed most — no matter where you are,” the sellers of the device say.
Because housemaids are a necessity if the mother goes to work, innovators have created systems to ensure that the minders are monitored.
An app called GPS Tracking Pro claims it can track your worker’s movements if they have a phone that can be reached via satellite.
So, a parent can buy the nanny such a phone without informing them that they are being tracked. They can later use the information relayed to determine whether the assistant had gone wandering when they should be at work.
It has other uses, as claimed by one of the reviewers of the app: “With a teenage daughter in the house, we used to worry where she was going. Now we see,” wrote one Benjamin McKenzie in an August 2014 post.
Besides tracking, you can do a background check as well. With the advent of mobile money transfer service, M-Pesa, a Nairobi-based company, Ollocom Consulting, came up with a system that enables potential employers to do a background check on the nanny before hiring her.
For Sh200 paid via the money transfer service, a parent can have the company research a prospective nanny’s background.
“How easy is it to replace your household equipment? Do you really know your domestic servant; do they have a record of brutality or theft? Where did they last work? Is it true?” one Ollocom advertisement asks.
“Send… your email address, the nanny’s name and ID number. Using our staff spread out in the counties, we will run a background check for you,” said the makers of the product in a newspaper advert last year.
