Baby Tech Market: Veritable Use Cases & Practical Economic Outlets

The interest in baby tech gadgets and service options is growing in leaps and bounds. This market surge is facilitated by tech-loving millennials, who, as of 2021 have become first-time parents and are now relying on their digital tendencies to find innovative solutions for their newborns.

In this piece, we’ll take a deep dive into the vast solutions that abound in this new market segment and what it offers to potential unicorns. We’ll also uncover initiatives that have thrived and the essentials to consider when cutting-edge baby tech solutions are formulated in the industry.

Market Overview

Millennial parents in the United States are expediting the rise of the Baby Tech market. Forbes reports that the market size stands at over $45B, while Statista estimates it to scrape $1.734B by 2024 at an annual growth ratio of 8.6% from 2016 to 2024. A study from Allied Market Research sets the annual growth ratio at 5.4% from 2020 to 2027, but foretells that the baby tech market size will expand to $1.9B by 2027.

Innovations in Baby Tech are rewarded by funding and awards, and you will find some examples in this baby tech market overview. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES)—the world’s #1 tech convention also presents the BabyTech Summit, which serves to track tech advancements from their inception to their release and adoption. The organization reported a spike in participation size, with competition entries almost doubling to a record 88% uptick in 2019.

The top-rated baby sleep and audience product at CES 2019 was Sleep Monitor Miku. This device tracks the breathing, sounds and sleeping behavior of the baby. It syncs to your smart device to play pre-recorded sounds to lull babies to sleep. The gadget also streams HD video and audio in real time. 

The most-liked baby solution of 2018 was also featured in the EarlySense Under-Mattress Fertility Tracker Percept. The brand developed the first contactless fertility monitor, which can bind to a smart device and can be placed beneath a mattress.

The fertility monitor records your baby’s heartbeat and breathing to suggest fertility periods. The previous winners of this title include a smart bassinet, sleep trackers, smart breast pumps, a smart flask, a smart sock, location monitors, and smart dolls.

In years past, baby tech was viewed as an alternative industry with minimal investor interest, especially at startup level. However, that narrative has flipped today as investors swarm the space looking to improve their portfolios. Crunchbase reported that investors staked $500M into outfits working in the segment between 2013 and 2019.

Leading Baby Tech Solutions

Startups building baby tech solutions aim to capture two sets of audiences—expectant parents and child-rearing parents. Overall, pregnancy monitors, heartbeat monitors, breathing readers, and EduTech services are the leading players in baby tech 2021.

Infant Care

There are many tracking mechanisms and smart devices that can keep tabs on the wellbeing and security of babies and toddlers. These systems include attachable oxygen and heart beat monitors, contactless body heat thermometers, fastened meters, and smart breast pumps.

The Owlet Smart Lock Baby Monitor. The Owlet Smart Lock Baby Monitor is a tracking system that provides real time data on the baby’s oxygenation level and pulse during sleep.

Essentially, it notifies the parent about heart rate changes and possible breathing challenges. To track these changes, the monitor is fitted with a sock that utilizes pulse-oximetry systems synced with the parent’s smartphone. This gizmo is also fitted with a SNOO smart bassinet that picks up crying, lulls the crying babe back to sleep, and can be controlled remotely via mobile app.

Learning and Entertainment

This year’s baby tech improvements range from electronic toys to AI-powered educational channels developed to improve a child’s intelligence and social responsiveness.

The Starling Wearable Clip. This product assists parents with their child’s development. The fastener provides data on a baby’s vocalization, movement, noise, and even exposure to sunlight. The app allows parents to enjoy excellent interactions with their children while providing them with insights on effective ways to track and improve child development.

Remote Baby Monitoring

These baby tech products enable parents to get up-to-the-minute info about their child’s wellness, comfort, and position. This niche experienced the emergence of smart car seats, air-integrity systems, room-temperature tracking mechanisms, and GPS mechanisms.

Sirona M. Sirona M is a smart car seat developed by Cybex to help babies stay well-fastened to the car. The technology comes with a smart chest clip wirelessly connected to the car’s receiver and the parent’s smart device. 

The smart GPS mechanism collects data on the child’s position, sends alerts when they veer out of a designated area, and enables the user to make emergency calls using an SOS button, chat, or voice call. To find the location and sync to smart devices, the monitors rely on innovations like Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular data.

Jiobit. Jiobit is a smart device that the wearer can fasten onto a school bag. It ensures real time observation and syncs to the smartphones of predetermined care-givers. 

To track a child’s location, parents usually use smartwatch brands like Lil Tracker and Mr. Securio. The former enables dual-call functionality and captures sound from the child’s environment. The latter on the other hand, saves motion timelines and transmits text or audio notes from parents.

Fertilization and Pregnancy

This baby technology line features solutions aimed at parents-to-be and women seeking to become pregnant . Lots of young women rely on digitized products like the oral thermometer Wink, a basal body temperature thermometer that uses Kindara tracking software.

Another product, a fertility monitor called Ava, can be fastened to the arm and worn at night. While the woman sleeps, the device reads various physical changes like perspiration, skin temperature, and heart rate. It then analyzes this information to suggest days of successful conception.

Prenatal trackers enable parents to track the progress of a fetus in the womb. Various in-home fetal monitors record sound waves to listen to the fetus’ heartbeat at any time from six to nine weeks of pregnancy.

HeraBEAT is a portable design that includes a mobile software that enables sharing of pregnancy information. Philips’ Avalon CL Fetal and Maternal Pod and Patch senses the pulse rate of the child and the mother’s uterine activity through designated patches taped to her belly. The developers of this tech created it as a response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Five Things to Know When Creating Baby Tech Solutions

If your organization is eyeing a transition into the baby tech sector, here are some key considerations that will ensure seamless adaptation.

Budgeting: funding allocation and management is crucial in how a new baby tech outfit will compete. Keep in mind that your resources are limited, so it is crucial to have a discovery phase to validate the project, capture operational requirements, determine the device’s functionality, mitigate any risk involved, and identify possible problems to properly inform investors.

Expertise Needed: developing baby tech requires a hands-on approach. You need a crop of talented personnel whose skillsets may vary across hardware, software, back-end configurations, and mobile services. 

Regulatory Compliance: in today’s world of litigation and settlements, adhering to code is everything. Keeping in line with statutory requirements will ensure that you gain access to the market and thrive.

Industry codes in the baby tech world include: HL7, HITRUST, HIPAA, DICOM, and FDA guidelines. 

The baby tech network manages critical data that can make or break a child’s development. For this, consumer electronics businesses that are not proactive about their baby care protocols may create devices liable to cyber-strikes, hampering the child’s wellness.

To develop a safe, impenetrable device, it is essential to publish enhancements to cloud and software functionalities, furnish the technology with airtight authentication, and prevent users from writing crackable passwords. To ensure optimum cybersecurity, use end to end data encryption technology and execute incursion attempt identification and circumvention (I.e. IDS/IPS) protocols.

Gauge the Market: there are three tenets of a successful tech release

• On time
• On budget, and
• According to code

However, there is a fourth tenet necessary to outmuscle the competition: being the first. Originality is perhaps the single most important marketing strategy. It ensures that your competition always remains in your wake.

Business experts can help startups in baby tech avoid pitfalls early on in the development process, control project requirements, and maximize the currency of time, ensuring their original products are first to hit the market.

Selecting the Right Vendor: There are only a few tech newcomers with the right skills to render a baby tech innovation all in one place. You will need to delegate the development of certain technological aspects to ensure timely production, while explaining the justification for the technology to various suppliers and vendors.

This will ensure that the deliverables are ready-to-use without modifications or tardiness. Managing multiple vendors will require a lot of work to ensure excellent team relationships. You will need to carefully monitor and cut out any inefficiencies in the solution you are deploying and be careful not to depend on a single supplier. This will prevent any issues with over-leveraging and over-dependency.