
Cringely – how Amazon’s Echo Dot could make a good SIDS alarm - BrandonMarc
http://www.cringely.com/2017/04/26/15429/
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BrandonMarc
The author's son died in his lap 15 years ago, similar to around 4000 babies
in the US each year. Through his grief he's put a lot of time and energy into
how a SIDS alarm would and would not work. This idea:

> _The goal of the alarm is to monitor the sleeping baby’s heart, detect a
> SIDS event, then set off a very loud alarm to rouse the baby because waking
> Mama often doesn’t work. So the Dot will be listening for the baby’s heart,
> monitoring its pattern, then blasting a loud noise if SIDS is detected. I
> know I just wrote pretty much the same thing twice but the sequence is that
> important._

(snip)

> _... you have to know what you are listening for. The American SIDS
> Institute (today in Naples, Florida, but in our day it was in Marietta,
> Georgia), has an audio library of SIDS deaths that actually happened while
> on a heart monitor. Remember what I said about parents being too tired to
> hear the alarm? Sadly the Institute has quite a selection of SIDS deaths to
> choose from and analysis of those deaths shows there is a characteristic
> slowing of the heart prior to a SIDS death. In every case the pattern (the
> rate of deceleration) is the same and the result is that death can almost
> always be predicted several minutes before it actually happens. That’s
> plenty of time to intervene, IF you know to do so._

Really the whole article gives great background into more related issues, and
how the tech landscape today is much more capable of creating a useful alarm
compared to 2002.

