This ‘Smart Pacifier’ Connects to Your Smartphone, Tracks Your Baby’s Temperature
Never lose a pacifier again. (Courtesy of Blue Maestro)
Monitoring your baby’s fever may be just as hard as keeping track of her binkie. But now there’s a Bluetooth-connected pacifier that can do both.
Announced Monday evening at the Consumer Electronics Show, Pacif-i is a classic pacifier that also takes your child’s temperature via a sensor and sends that information via Bluetooth to an Android or iOS app on your smartphone. For each daily measurement, the app will time-stamp and plot the day’s temperature on a graph, displaying a child’s temperature progression over time.
Ultimately, this long-term data can become valuable to health professionals, according to the Pacif-i’s makers. It not only provides constant updates on your child’s health; it can also help inform his treatment plan in the event of an unexpected sickness.
But while it’s meant to be a medical aid first, Pacif-i proves convenient in other everyday situations, too. Because the gadget emits a low-energy Bluetooth signal to your phone every two minutes, it works as an excellent location tracker. Anytime it exceeds a range of about 100 feet, its signal will be cut off, and it’ll automatically drop a pin at whatever geographic location your phone last received a signal. So, if your child has sneakily hidden or flung her pacifier, you should be able to track it down with ease.
The Pacif-i’s sensor is located within its silicon teat. (Courtesy of Blue Maestro)
Or, say your kid is the type to make a break for it. Anytime the Pacif-i moves more than 20 feet from your connected device, an alarm will go off.
A beta version of the tracking feature in Pacif-i’s companion app. (Alyssa Bereznak/Yahoo Tech)
You might be wondering: Just how healthy is it to have a Bluetooth signal beaming from inside your infant’s mouth all day? Well, according to impressive research, summed up here by Businessweek, even an extensive amount of exposure to Bluetooth poses little to no risk to humans. Hence the existence of a Bluetooth pacifier in the first place.
That being said, Blue Maestro, a company that makes other smart home appliances like scales and home sensors, is still waiting to be FDA approved in the United States (the company says it’ll be any day now). But that means you must currently order the product from overseas on its website for $40 a pop. Might be worth it, if it means no more lost binkies.
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