A Baby Sleep Monitor Using Raspberry Pi

What does innovation mean? Does it mean solving a real life problem by creating something non-existent? Or does it mean improving something existent to solve that very problem? If the answer is later, here is an innovation par excellence which solves two limitations that baby monitors in the market have: 1) their inability to tell for how long a baby has been crying or sleeping or blabbering or wehatever 2) their absence of record of the times a baby has woken up in a given period.

This information was important to the inventor of this DIY who was also a father to a toddler at the time. So, to provide a body and brain to the concept he had in his mind, he bought a Raspberry Pi with internet access and installed NOOBS on it. Next, he plugged a USB microphone to it. And he set out to create his own baby sleep monitor which was more intelligent than the ones found in the market.

In the project. one can also use a USB webcam which works well with RPi and also has a high mic sensitivity. Since he did not need to monitor using a webcam, he uses the USB microphone he possessed. The microphone processes voice of the baby and an audio server communicates using a shared memory. Which means the audio server acts as a channel or agent between the microphone process and the web server. The software code is provided on the personal blog.

Innovation is a continuous process, especially when it comes to Rpi based home projects. The more ideas you get, the more you can implement them. The inventor here knows this which is why he has a couple of ideas to implement next on the baby sleep monitor: 1) An audio alert if there has been noise for a pre-specified time 2) A storage of the event logs in a database, and plotting of the baby’s sleeping patterns against time. These are cool and useful ideas.