Bringing up baby the high-tech way

Bringing up children is not an easy job and first-time parents may find it particularly hard to deal with the cycle of sleepless nights, diaper changes and howling babies. Some turn to family, others to technology. Urban Indian couples are increasingly using hi-tech gadgets to make parenting fun.
Sunanda Dutta, a clinical psychologist in Bangalore, uses a baby monitor to keep an eye on her six-month-old. “It takes the pressure off me when I have to attend to household chores or reply to emails,” she says. In fact, the baby monitor is one of the few gadgets that new parents use the most, both in the west and increasingly, in India.It can be either audio or video. The audio version has microphones, which are placed near the baby to ‘hear’ every time the baby moves. This sound is transmitted to a speaker, which receives it. Video monitors transmit even the tiniest of the baby’s movements as images to the receiving screen. Chandrasekhar, owner of Teks International, which sells baby monitors in Bangalore, says, “Every time there is a movement, the motion sensor of the gadget sends a beep to the monitor, which has a 3.5-inch screen.”
Raj Kumar, president of the Babyshop by Lifestyle chain of stores, says, “If one intends to use a baby monitor while moving from room to room, invest in a mobile one, not just one that plugs into a socket.”
Then there is the Trixie Tracker (TT), a web application that keeps track of the baby’s sleep and the number of times it has been breastfeed, changed and vaccinated. It is slowly gaining popularity here in India. Raghu Vaidyanathan, a techie in Hyderabad, has been using it on his iPhone for his year-old son.
TT was designed six years ago by American Ben MacNeill, a stay-at-home father. It is built on HTML or CSS or JS and can consequently run on any modern web or mobile browser. Parents or caregivers sign up for a TT account, feed in the data, which is then crunched and displayed. McNeill told TOI in an email that “TT can help working parents feel connected with the baby. It also reveals patterns that a sleep-deprived parent might overlook.”
However, the number of tech-savvy parents is small in India compared to the west. Bharat Kapur, publisher of “Parenting” magazine says, “The sense of family is too strong in India to leave child-rearing to technology.” Perhaps, that’s why Japan-based Combi International, which makes juvenile products including the 360 degree convertible car seat, says it has no plans to venture into India.