Cringely – how Amazon’s Echo Dot could make a good SIDS alarm

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.