Coming Soon: The Wearable, Online, All-the-Time Baby Monitor From the department of the inevitable: the Exmobaby wireless, biosensor baby onesie. It's washable, rechargeable and transmits information up to 100 feet. Soon, very soon, you can monitor your baby's ECG, skin temperature, and movement, and have constant alerts sent to your PC or mobile phone. But do you really want to? It's hard, especially as a first-time parent, to resist every possible thing designed to make your baby "safer." Basic baby monitors have long since become standard (I still have a Pavlovian reaction to that burst of static that precedes the cry). Video monitors are increasingly common. The Exmobaby, which is now available only to "potential distributors, clinicians and technology partners worldwide," and not yet to consumers, has the look of the next generation of would-be new-parent-panic-proofers. Of course, something like this could be valuable to research scientists, and to babies with medical conditions that actually require constant monitoring. But that doesn't appear to be the target market, and who's surprised? On its Web site, Exmovere Holdings (makers of the Exmobaby) note not just the number of births in the U.S. and worldwide every year, but the number of first-time parents - because this is the kind of thing that first-time parents, in particular, buy. Exmobaby parents will be able to see icons representing their baby's heartbeat, emotional state and activity level on their cellphones. This is especially important for first-time mothers re-entering the work force, parents concerned about the vigilance of their babysitter, and childcare centers juggling the needs of multiple children. Exmobaby will also be marketed to parents worried about infant sleep apnea, choking and other dangers that relate to SIDS. In aiming itself at Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), Exmobaby is targeting one of the deepest fears of all new parents. But the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended, in 2003, that even families with a history of SIDS not use home cardiorespiratory monitors as preventatives. A systematic review of all available studies published in Acta Paediatrica in January 2012 showed no evidence that such home monitoring was of use. It's not clear that the Exmobaby offers any data not provided by those monitors. It appears to be a more convenient, less intrusive, definitively more hip version of the same thing. Dr. Robert Marion, chief of genetics and developmental medicine at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, told me by e-mail that he thought the Exmobaby looked "crazy." Outside of those few children who need ongoing cardiopulmonary monitoring, he said, using a system like this on children who have no known risks is "looking for trouble." "Such systems malfunction all the time," he wrote. They erroneously go off at all hours of the day and night, causing families unbelievable anxiety. Families wind up focusing all of their energies on the monitors and wind up not sleeping. The Exmobaby does offer promising new baby-interaction entertainment for the geekiest among us (and I would generally include myself in that number): you can label and record various moods, like "giggly," or "grumpy," and then see if the moods correspond when the baby returns to a particular biometric state - thus turning your baby into a very complex version of a Tamagotchi pet. What can you do to get the baby's "happiness level" up? Experiment and see! But Dr. Marion didn't find the secondary promises of the Exmobaby particularly welcome, either, and neither did his colleague, Dr. Nora Esteban, assistant director of pediatric hospital medicine, who questioned the reliability of "computerized algorithms" without further study, and suspected the whole thing put the parent-child relationship at risk. Because, as every current parent is aware, babies already come well equipped with a built-in monitor that, with some experience, tells you pretty much what you need to know about their moods and needs. You don't need an app to tell you if a diaper is wet, or if the baby is hungry. You need to look at the baby, listen to the baby, and try to figure out what's going on with the baby. On the one hand, that isn't always easy. On the other hand, it doesn't take batteries, and it pays pretty great dividends in the long term. And as for high-tech monitoring that promises to give you some peace of mind regarding the likelihood of sudden, inexplicable tragedy striking your child? There's no device that can do that. Risk - of illness, of accident, of the unfair and the horrible and the heart-breaking - is part of what comes in the "baby" package, and that's just to build you up until you're ready for the "toddler" and "teenager" models. Learning to accept it, and find a way to still get some sleep, is one of the harder tasks of becoming a parent. For that, I'm quite sure the Exmobaby isn't going to help.