Nanit uses computer vision to monitor your baby’s sleep patterns

Baby monitors have been around for a while. But Nanit wants to take them up a notch, using computer vision to track your baby’s sleep patterns. This is a product aimed at easing parents’ anxiety about how their baby is doing — allowing parents and infants to sleep more soundly at night.

New York-based Nanit has built a smart camera called Nanit that hangs over the baby’s crib. It transmits information to your smartphone, giving you reports based on the data it collects. Then it uses machine learning to provide insights about the baby’s behavior and sleep patterns. It can send an alert telling you if your baby is awake, is crying, or has finally gone to sleep on its own. That kind of information can provide better peace of mind and better sleep for the entire family.

On the strength of that idea, Nanit has raised $6.6 million in funding from Mark Suster at Upfront Ventures, with participation from RRE, 645 Ventures, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Flextronics, and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.

Both babies and parents need more sleep. On average, parents lose 44 nights of sleep during the first year of their baby’s life, and nearly 3 in 10 babies have problems sleeping at night. Nanit CEO and cofounder Assaf Glazer realized the need for technology to better measure infant sleep and provide parents with actionable information to improve not only their child’s sleep, but their own, as well.

Above: Nanit gives you a bird’s-eye view of your baby.

Image Credit: Nanit

“Like most scientists, I’m driven by curiosity. When I had my son four years ago, I really wanted to understand his behavior, make sure he was safe and healthy, and be the best parent to him that I could. And if I could get some sleep while accomplishing all of this, even better,” said Glazer, in a statement. “That’s what sparked my idea to apply my experience building intelligent cameras to my struggles at home and create the first baby monitor that can help parents truly connect with and understand their kids. We’ve added in all of the features that parents like ourselves would want, and we’ve found that by helping our babies sleep better, we sleep better too.”

Nanit doesn’t come with sensors, bands, or egregious notifications. The company says the camera goes beyond mere baby surveillance by creating benchmarks, counting sleep interruptions, and contextualizing milestones in individual sleep environments to show everyone involved in baby’s care not just whether the baby is sleeping, but how well.

Nanit calculates sleep quality scores on a daily and nightly basis. It tracks and understands four scientific measures of sleep, including sleep patterns, parent interventions, sleep onset, and total hours of sleep. It can show parents a real-time high-definition livestream video of their baby, using night vision. It also provides time-lapse videos of the baby throughout the day.

The camera gives a bird’s-eye view of the baby, and it has a built-in nightlight and lullaby sound box. The tech is protected with security measures, including AES 256-bit symmetric-key encryption; Virtual Private Cloud (VPC); and secure HTTP access (HTTPS), using TLS/SSL. In addition, Nanit is compliant with the HIPAA medical law. Parents can share the details of their child’s activity with other family members or caregivers.

Above: Nanit tells parents if the baby really has fallen asleep.

Image Credit: Nanit

Nanit has been beta-tested by a group of thirty families for the last six months.

The company was cofounded by Assaf Glazer, Tor Ivry, and Andrew Berman. Glazer spent the last 15 years making cameras smarter, with advanced computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Prior to Nanit, Ivry held senior positions at Philips and Applied Materials, where he and Glazer were colleagues, and Berman worked as an investor at Norwest Venture Partners.

The Nanit camera will sell for $350, but for a limited time it’s available for $280. Nanit’s analytics subscription model is $10 per month, but will be offered at a more than 50 percent discount for customers who choose to purchase the one-year package at checkout, for a total price of $50.

Nanit plans to start shipping the product in the U.S. in the fall.