Welcome to the age of the quantified baby!

On December 29, 2020, Lucie’s baby suckled two hours and twenty-three minutes in four times, for a total of fifty-four minutes on the left breast, one hour and twenty-nine on the right breast. The little girl was also changed six times, including one “mixed” and five “wet” diapers. And she slept eleven hours and one minute, six times. How does Lucie get this information, with precision worthy of an athletics stopwatch, almost a year later? Because in the hazy twists and turns that constitute the first months of an infant, she recorded all this information in an application on her smartphone, Bébé +, synchronized with her husband’s phone.

Days, weeks, months of a baby’s life transformed into figures, then recorded and presented in the form of colored graphics, this is the proposal for a series of applications for “tracking” newborns, some paying, others free: Baby Manager, Baby Tracker, Bébé +… Click on the pictograms of diapers, bra for breastfeeding (with left / right option), moon for sleep, all in an environment of pastel colors and photos that you slide yourself in.

Diaper register

THE’Homo sapiens Modern has learned in recent years to measure the number of his steps, to check his heart rate and the calories burned during his jogging, to fix his sleep on the recommendations of his phone; now he has another object of study than himself to digitize: his child. He can keep the diapers register with their degree of soiling (supporting photos) and the “surprise watering” option, time crying or breastfeeding to the nearest minute. Welcome to the age of the quantified baby.

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These applications are intended above all as a practical aid for young parents subjected to the impossible equation “tenfold attention / endangered sleep”. Xavier Launay created the Bébé Connect app in 2009, which he designed at the time “As a communication tool”: “When I was a young dad, I would get up at night to take over from my wife, and I did not know if our child had eaten, if he had been changed … didn’t want to wake her up to ask her. “ Its app, which has been downloaded 1 million times since its inception, is available in 11 languages ​​and now has 100,000 monthly active users, 80% of whom are in the United States. At Philips, the Bébé + app (22 languages, 1.1 million active users per month worldwide, including 85,000 in France) was created “By a couple of British parents who were looking for answers”, explains Kavita Harrison, Head of Customer Service. For its part, the government is in the midst of a campaign to promote an application and a site, First 1000 days, developed to guide young parents from the “parenthood project” until the child is 2 years old. We follow a path punctuated by stages (early pregnancy, childbirth, 0-3 months, etc.) on which we click for information and advice. You can also synchronize your calendar with that of the app to find out about upcoming appointments (pediatrician, vaccines, etc.).

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