As you know, I am on the fence about all of this tech stuff for parents – like the Smartbe stroller. I know technology helps us in so many ways, but do we really need an app to translate a baby’s cry, like this one I read about on Reuters?
Taiwanese researchers developed the app, called the Infant Cries Translator, which differentiates crying sounds for hunger, a wet diaper, sleepiness and pain.
“Over a two year period researchers collected around 200,000 crying sounds from approximately 100 new-born babies, and uploaded them to an online database. Analysis of the frequency of individual screams among these helped researchers,” Reuters reports.
The app, which costs $2.99 to download, analyzes the baby’s cry within 15 seconds and has a 92 percent accuracy rate for infants under 2 weeks old. Creators say it’s not as accurate as baby is older than 6 months because he or she becomes more affected by environmental factors.
While the creators believe it’s a useful tool, I think it’s ridiculous. Our mothers didn’t need an app to figure out what was wrong with us. They figured it out by process of elimination – and to this day, my mom can hear a baby cry and know exactly what his or her problem is.
Why do we need even more technology to do our job as parents? Just because we have such advances in technology, which can be a great thing in so many cases, doesn’t mean we need to take things this far.
Learn to trust your instincts. You don’t need an app for that.
What do you think? Am I overreacting? Comment below.
