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Developed by Gil Weinberg, Rich Fletcher and Seum-Lim Gan the BabySense Environment is designed to enhance an infant's sensory-motor experience, to allow parents and relatives to remotely monitor infant’s development, and to enable new types of interactions with other infants. The system also demonstrates alternate peripheral means of displaying information such as lights, sound and a kinetic sculpture. |  The BabySense System |
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| Sensing - The sensor pad is a comfortable soft foam pad
which can sense the baby’s presence and motion. The
foam pad contains regions of electrically conductive
fabric that form electrodes. Sensing is done by
monitoring changes in the capacitance of the fabric
electrodes [5]. Both the presence of a human body and
pressure on the fabric will produce detectable signals.
These signals can be used to detect limb movement and
other patterns of behavior like sitting up, standing up,
playing with toys etc. Local Display - The local output device or “display” is a mobile sculpture object that hangs above the baby’s crib. At present, the local display shows data in the form of lights and sound in response to the baby’s movements. Controlling the motion of parts of the mobile are also possible as an additional means of displaying information. |
 A Baby on
the internal side |
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| Remote Display - The remote display enables parents to monitor
their baby's activity from a remote location, whenever
local monitoring is not possible. It also enables the
possibility for distant people (e.g. grandmother or
parent at work) to monitor the baby’s activity and
perhaps participate in the baby's physical and cognition
progress. Devices for remotely displaying the BabySense information can be in the form of either a foreground or background remote displays. A foreground display device is one that directly and obviously displays the data. Alternatively, a background display is more subtle and provides peripheral information, thus enabling the user to focus on other ongoing tasks. The foreground remote display we have selected is a small (hand-size) toy panda bear. The toy contains embedded colored lights and a small audio speaker which are activated in a controlled manner in response to the baby’s movements and development. As the baby grows, the patterns of lights evolve to reflect the baby’s development. As an example of a background display, we chose a kinetic sculpture which is compatible with other decorative objects used on an office desk or on a grandmother’s night table. |
A grandmother monitors |
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| Interaction - The BabySense also incorporates an interaction mode where infants can interact with a friend in a remote place via special wireless interconnected toys. In addition to serving as a remote display, these special toys will employ kinesthetic interaction. For example, when the baby nudges the toy in his crib, it can cause the toy in the other baby’s crib to wiggle. Second baby’s response will also be transmitted back to first, which creates an interactive circle between two infants sitting across from each other in adjacent cribs. |  2 babies interact with musical disks |
