Owlet Baby Monitor: A Product Review
As a first time mother, I was unsure about a lot of things. I was definitely one of those mothers who would wake up multiple times in the night just to make sure Winter was not too hot or too cold and to check to see if she was breathing.
I try my best not to let fear drive the wheel in my life, but I would be lying if I said I didn't worry about her while she slept. I had no idea that the Owlet Baby Monitor existed; otherwise, I would definitely have used it during those early months of infancy. The Owlet uses pulse oximetry, the same technology that a hospital uses to monitor oxygen levels and heart rate. But instead of using a finger or toe clip, the monitor is disguised in a little sock worn by a sleeping baby.
The sock has wireless capabilities which link to an app on your phone that displays the baby's heart rate and oxygen level. It also has a base station that not only charges the sock when it's not in use, but is designed to alert you along with your phone if something may be wrong with the baby's heart or oxygen levels.
I found the product to be user friendly and have been using it consistently for three weeks now to ensure that I could do a thorough review. I was little skeptical that Winter would try to take it off, so to get her used to it before she slept with it on, I put it on while she was eating in her high chair. She noticed it at first, but seemed to quickly forget about it and would just touch it from time to time while she was crawling around.
The product requires you to download an app (that is compatible with both Iphone and Android). It was helpful to download it a couple hours before she was due for a nap to make sure I became accustomed to the settings and features. While it is user friendly, I wanted to be certain that the phone was linked to the sock and the charging station before I used it on Winter so that I wouldn’t have to play around with it while she was sleeping. I’m happy I tried it in advance, as I had to do a little troubleshooting to get the phone to sync to the sock, but the good news is that I was able to fix it quickly. The app has an awesome troubleshooting page that helped me figure out what was wrong within a few minutes (I had to make sure that the base was plugged to an outlet before it would sync).
So far it's been pretty uneventful with the monitor, which is a GREAT thing. The only issue I’ve had is when Winter is wiggling too much and the monitor informs me that it can't get a reading until she settles down. But I was expecting this to this happen, as it mentions this "wiggle" effect in the instructions.
For me, I think this product would have been the most helpful to use when Winter was younger. I would have especially loved the piece of mind it brings being able to check her vitals when we transitioned her into her own room. I’ll be saving this product for baby #2 and you can most certainly put it on the list of baby rearing products I wish I had known about earlier! The price is a little steep, but after going through the early infancy stage, reading the reviews, and trying out the product and liking it, the piece of mind it brings alone seems worth the price.
Photography by Brittany Renee'
Thank you to Owlet Baby Monitor for graciously sponsoring this post and letting our family try out their product. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.