At the beginning of 2017, the toy company Mattel announced the launch of a new product: a machine called Aristotle, designed to help parents, "through the most advanced artificial intelligence technology", to protect and educate "the most important asset of their homes: their children.”
Inspired by Amazon's Alexa, Aristotle consisted of a medium-sized speaker, deep red, topped by a tubular lamp and accompanied by a camera. The device had the ability to sing lullabies, tell stories and recite the alphabet to the creatures, as well as speak to them in other languages. Connected to a mobile application, Aristotle's software also promised to monitor the child's environment, notify if any product necessary for their upbringing ran out or if it detected interesting offers in the market. Mattel promised "a brutal leap forward in parental technology", going far beyond the classic walkie-talkies, which began to proliferate in children's rooms at the end of the last century.
But that leap did not come to pass: upon news of the invention, a campaign against it was unleashed in the United States, headed by the organization Commercial-Free Childhood, which fights for a childhood free of commercial interests. The protest was based on a premise: that device was not a virtual babysitter, but an intruder. And children's rooms, one of his spokespersons stressed in The New York Times, should be free of "corporate snooping." Not forgetting that machines should not be used as a substitute for essential parental functions. Given the uproar, the company decided not to market Aristotle.
However, that gesture did not set a precedent. Since 2017, the technological offer for breeding has been increasing without pause. And with the expansion of artificial intelligence (machines that imitate human intelligence), a thousand possibilities are opening up in the market. Consequently, there are all kinds of programs and devices for the care of creatures in which artificial intelligence is applied: cribs that automatically respond to the needs of the baby. Socks that monitor her vital signs. Robots that talk about emotions. Parenting is a booming market, often based on parents' natural fears, easily turned into anxieties. It is estimated that, in 2020, in the West, baby safety products generated sales that touched one billion dollars. Its growth expectations in 2028 are almost double.
Among the most popular products are "smart socks", a device that combines two concepts that until now seemed disparate. The Owlet Baby Monitor Smart Sock, for example, monitors the child's heart rate and oxygen level, and warns if the records deviate from the preset. Like most products of this type, it can be complemented with a camera, placed in the room; This addition increases the price of the sock, which exceeds €300. The results of what the algorithm detects are consulted through a mobile application, another ubiquitous resource in the world of artificial intelligence applied to parenting. The sock, with "fast wireless charging," also tracks sleep patterns and quality.
The field of children's sleep includes an important offer of technological utensils. From Lulla Care, a Spanish start-up specialized in applying artificial intelligence to maternity, it claims "to have helped more than 5,000 families to sleep through the night." As? Through applications that, among other things, record, in graphs, things that were previously written down in a notebook, such as diaper changes and baby feedings. Of course, some programs incorporate a camera and make it easy, for an extra payment, to store the videos of the sleeping baby in the cloud, as a virtual album. They also control the temperature of the room and notify, by means of a mobile alert, of any anomaly.
Lulla Care's app designed for sleep also records sleep habits, but offers a few extras, such as "innovative music routines" that, they say, "will help your baby fall asleep and reduce awakenings." Belonging to the Lulla Care community also makes it possible to chat with a team of pediatricians, psychologists and child sleep coaches, to clear up doubts. If before the telephone was picked up to consult with the grandmother or the doctor of the creature, the current proposal is to chat with a professional who, probably, has never seen her.
With the "snoo smart cradle" it has gone one step further. Its creator is an American pediatrician, Dr. Harvey Karp, who says he was inspired to design it by the sensations the baby perceives in the womb. Karp assures that babies who use his crib (whose price is around €1,200), "will sleep nine hours or more after three months." As? The crib is smart and "automatically responds to baby's fuss with calming sounds and movement." In other words, if the baby cries or gets restless, the crib reacts, rocking or making sounds, to automatically calm it down. He makes sure that the program is able to distinguish between cries: it calms him down when he is tired, but does not act if he is hungry or uncomfortable. This is where parents have to intervene.
And it is that artificial intelligence claims to be able to distinguish the crying of the baby: there are already applications that promise to discern if it is caused by hunger, sleep, a dirty diaper, etc. The system to create a cry translator is the same used for any artificial intelligence program: it is fed with a lot of data (in this case, the sounds of hundreds of thousands of baby cries) for the algorithm to diagnose the cause. The company Zoundrim, based in Barcelona and Basel, claims to have the largest database of infant cries in the world. Its co-founder is a Spaniard, Ana Laguna, a data analyst from whose experience as a new mother this project was born, when she decided to apply artificial intelligence to try to understand what her son was telling her. Today, parents who opt for their algorithm receive the result (“sleep”, “hunger”, “tummy pain”…) via mobile.
“It is a very useful system, especially for first-timers. It works automatically and consequently reduces stress,” says Zoundrim user Leonid. For Benedetta, another user: "The idea is incredible, being able to confirm what I think or be corrected makes me feel more secure."
Discerning the causes of a baby's crying thanks to a machine can be reassuring, but should it be left to software to interpret or delegate the task of calming a baby to an intelligent crib? “The first question that comes to mind is why a mother and father want to delegate this care and protection to a machine”, answers Agnès Brossa, a psychologist specializing in family.
In his thirty-five years treating parents and children, Brossa has seen a lot, but he finds the use of artificial intelligence in parenting puzzling, to say the least: “I would like to understand why,” he reiterates. "Calm down? Have more time? Not having the inconvenience of taking care of a baby in the first few months, which, yes, is tiring? This therapist has no doubt that the parents are the ones who perform these functions best: “They are the ones who know the baby from day one and are learning to identify their needs… If you delegate that to a machine: How will you know their cries later? And how will the baby learn to cry a little louder, if one day he is immediately ignored? Or to express other needs? Can the machine find out other reasons for discomfort?” she asks.
Safety is not the only area of parenting in which artificial intelligence is being applied. Today children have the possibility of having robot friends, who will teach them aspects as human as knowing their emotions. This is how Moxie is promoted, a small android that is advertised as "the first emotional support robot for children." Moxie, explain its creators, is aimed at children between the ages of five and ten and its purpose "is to help them develop the necessary skills to succeed in life." Among them is emotional intelligence, a fashionable concept.
Moxie is blue, has green eyes, and a built-in speaker; she looks like a Pixar cartoon. They assure that she, among others, she teaches children to recognize and name their emotions, to control anger and to deal with anxiety. To resolve conflicts, instill healthy habits and routines, and learn to make mistakes. Defined as a "compassionate friend," Moxie also encourages his human friends to read, draw and play. He is also programmed to encourage children to write "caring notes" to their family and talk about their feelings. In real life, it's highly unlikely to voluntarily choose such a friend in childhood: one who urges you to write kind notes, teaches you healthy habits, or how to distinguish emotions. And it is that, traditionally, these tasks have corresponded… to the parents.
