Measuring Sleep with a Camera Makes Nanit a Powerful Tool for Research
/
Assaf Glazer, LDV Vision Summit 2018 ©Robert Wright
Assaf Glazer is the founder & CEO of Nanit. At our 2018 LDV Vision Summit, he shared how Nanit's unique computer vision technology and the product helps children and their parents sleep better. Merging advanced computer vision with proven sleep science technologies, Nanit provides in-depth data available for helping babies, and parents, sleep well in those crucial early months and years of a baby’s development. He spoke about how this technology is expandable to the greater population as well, leading to early detection of other disease states like sleep apnea, seizures, autism, and more. He shared the state of the art today and how he envisions sleep tech helping society in 10 and 20 years.
Hello, everyone. I'm Assaf, the CEO, and founder of Nanit. Our business is human analytics. If you are not familiar with Nanit, we sell baby monitors that measure sleep and parental interaction. We use computer vision for this purpose. And there are thousands of parents today across the U.S. that are using Nanit to sleep better.
Nanit is a camera that is mounted above the crib. The experience with Nanit is very different from any other baby monitor that you can think of. I won't go much into reviews but I would say that on BGR, they wrote, "This baby monitor is so impressive, we want to have a baby just to try it."
The camera costs $279 and there is a subscription, $10 a month, or $100 a year. If you look at how we do it, actually, we do it on different levels. First, we give you the best view of your child and then we give you some real-time information about what happened in the crib. It helps you to manage nap time, check your child remotely, and know, “my baby woke up one hour ago, he sleeps for 20 minutes.” We give you daily and weekly updates and every week, we'll also send you sleep tips and recommendations on how to improve sleep based on the personal data that we saw during the last week. And finally, we celebrate achievements and give you rewards for sleep milestones and accomplishments from the last week.
“When you measure sleep with a camera, you can also measure the environment, the behavior and build a picture around the sleep architecture.”
We measure sleep. We actually measure sleep better than the state-of-the-art medical device. There are different ways to measure sleep but when you do it with a camera, you can also measure the environment, the behavior, and build a picture around the sleep architecture. In this context of babies, we also measure the parent and we know when the parent is approaching the crib when he's touching the baby when he's taking the baby out of the crib or differentiate it with a different kind of moment that we would like to ignore. Then, by combining these behaviors together, along with other behaviors of the child, we can have a very precise diagnosis of sleep issues and beyond.
This is deeply anchored in research. When we were part of the runway program at Cornell Tech - they help people looking to commercialize science - and they really helped us build collaboration between different verticals; sleep experts and psychologists, cognitive development, model development, etc. Today, we have plenty of studies in the works, in collaboration with different types of institutes we are publishing papers.
Just last month, we published a paper at the IBSA Conferences. We took three months - 175,000 nights’ sleep - we analyzed and tracked the parental intervention patterns between zero to 24 months age babies.
Assaf Glazer, LDV Vision Summit 2018 ©Robert Wright
So Nanit is also a research tool. It's a research tool that can tell you about behaviors and sleep. Here you see across the US. For instance, you can see that babies in Denver tend to wake up one more time than in the rest of the states. I don't know the reason, but it is just a fact. We have very precise data on babies’ sleep so we can tell you every day if the sleep pattern changes. It's interesting to see, for instance, that at Thanksgiving, parents are putting their baby to sleep earlier. Maybe so they will have quality time during their dinner?
Nanit is a very powerful tool. The ability to record the night and then analyze it will serve the need of people in the medical field as well as parents. Looking at Nanit as a research tool, Nanit gives you so much information. By having Nanit in the house and monitoring thousands of normal children, we can learn more about what is normal. And if we know what is normal, then we can know what's not normal and are these the early signs of a future disease?
There are constant movements to try to identify children who are at risk for autism earlier and earlier. With this technology, we could certainly develop some normative data and to be able to identify otherwise unrecognized signs. This technology could also be used in the adult population, a hospital setting, or a hospice setting, or perhaps a nursing care setting.
It can look at restless leg movement, it can look at the breathing, and of course, sleep apnea is much more common in adults than in children. Then it can really open our eyes to things we didn't know as researchers, that we couldn't study in our own labs and can change the way we treat children and adults as well.
So Nanit is also a research tool. It's a research tool that can tell you about behaviors and sleep. Here you see across the US. For instance, you can see that babies in Denver tend to wake up one more time than in the rest of the states. I don't know the reason, but it is just a fact. We have very precise data on babies’ sleep so we can tell you every day if the sleep pattern changes. It's interesting to see, for instance, that at Thanksgiving, parents are putting their baby to sleep earlier. Maybe so they will have quality time during their dinner?
Nanit is a very powerful tool. The ability to record the night and then analyze it will serve the need of people in the medical field as well as parents. Looking at Nanit as a research tool, Nanit gives you so much information. By having Nanit in the house and monitoring thousands of normal children, we can learn more about what is normal. And if we know what is normal, then we can know what's not normal and are these the early signs of a future disease?
There are constant movements to try to identify children who are at risk for autism earlier and earlier. With this technology, we could certainly develop some normative data and to be able to identify otherwise unrecognized signs. This technology could also be used in the adult population, a hospital setting, or a hospice setting, or perhaps a nursing care setting.
It can look at restless leg movement, it can look at the breathing, and of course, sleep apnea is much more common in adults than in children. Then it can really open our eyes to things we didn't know as researchers, that we couldn't study in our own labs and can change the way we treat children and adults as well.
Nanit is the future of consumer-facing health. When we are looking at the future, you can think about the application in pediatrics, but also adult sleep, elder care, big data analysis.
Watch Assaf Glazer’s keynote at our LDV Vision Summit 2018 below and check out other keynotes on our videos page.