Sapna MaheshwariAug 3, 2026 – 10.39amFor all but a few nights of my first child’s life, her sleep has been recorded and analysed by the Nanit Smart Baby Monitor System. A sleek white camera, bolted to the wall, points straight down at her body. High-definition footage is beamed to a server, where machine-learning algorithms log her movements and the precise moments her eyes open and close. The data is distilled into charts and insights that my husband and I review in the Nanit app: a daily “sleep efficiency” score, from zero to 100; minutes until sleep onset; the number of times we were needed over the course of a night.Initially, we’d purchased the monitor simply for the ability to check on our daughter from anywhere using our phones. But we were quickly awed by everything else it could do, even as I recognised how unnecessary it was to have this much data about our baby, who was, in fact, a pretty decent sleeper.Subscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? Fetching latest articles
Aw, it’s baby’s first AI surveillance system
Nanit and other start-ups want to track your children through the night – and soon, for much longer than that. The downsides of this rush are manifest.
TL;DRAI
Nanit's monitor uses ML to analyze infant sleep: movement tracking, eye-closure detection, efficiency scoring. Feature creep from simple video check to behavioral analysis highlights how consumer IoT normalizes data collection beyond user awareness, risking trust.
184 words~1 min read
