3500 American babies due suddenly and unexpectedly from SIDS every year. I wonder if there is any research into where these babies were sleeping when they died. Am I an idiot for wondering if they died from the sheer terror of waking up alone in a dark room?
Co-sleeping is also somewhat popular, but it greatly increases the chance of SIDS with risks skyrocketing for smoking mothers and those who are bed-sharing but don't usually do bed-sharing.
It already triggered a few times for us, luckily in all cases it was because we carried the baby from the crib a forgot the turn off the breath detector :-D
Obviously, it's one of those things where most people will never actually know if it works or not (thankfully), but based on the fact that it goes off without fail every time I forget to turn the damn thing off after picking the baby up fills me with confidence that it does do what it's supposed to.
Children just stop breathing. Some newer research suggests this is a genetic issue.
Of course there is misdiagnosis for children that suffocate because of toys/blankets.
It's a particularly interesting finding because we already know that low levels of BChE correspond to an additional challenges waking up from anaesthetic, and the working hypothesis is that this may be linked to the arousal system.
One other potential link is to SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy), which so far we also don't understand the cause of, but it may be similar to SIDS (or in fact, it may even be the exact same condition) - it often presents very similarly (face down in bed, no obvious signs of suffocation, etc.). In fact, in Australia and New Zealand, SIDS is being renamed to SUDI (Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy), which sort of speaks for itself in terms of similarities.
- don't smoke
- always have infants sleep on their back
Is anyone here familiar with the subject across ancient cultures more broadly?
Personally, I sleep better when I’m alone. Haven’t convinced my wife that we should have a separate king and queen suite, though.
There are still a few that live traditionally in what basically is a large, two-floor long house for a multi-generational household. The families live on the second floor in one large room, but often with a small loft area for a quasi-third floodr The bottom floor is open with no walls (just support beams) to keep the animals. So it's constantly noisy.
The product I am talking about is NOT the Owlet Dream Sock. That version is useless for this purpose. You need the now-discontinued Owlet Smart Sock, of which the most recent version was version 3. I believe the app is no longer available in the app store, and you need the app to use it, but I think if you have an Android device you can probably find an APK on one of the APK mirror sites. Personally, I have the iOS app which I still have due to having installed it on my phone before it was discontinued.
I hope someone will make an open-source product like this. It's conceptually quite simple: connect a pulse oximeter to a loud audible alarm. I would also love to be able to get an adult version as well for my grandparents that would call 911 automatically if they stop breathing or their heart stops. Calling 911 automatically would not be allowed in a product I think, but it could be done in an open-source / open-hardware product where the builder of the kit takes on the liability of breaking the 911-related laws (which in my view is a tiny price to pay for saving a loved one's life).
If any hardware hackers are looking for project ideas, an open version of the Owlet Smart Sock would be an incredible thing to build for the world.
P.S. my pet theory for what causes SIDS is that the part of the brain stem that controls breathing needs time to develop, and when the brain is super young that part of the brain is not yet fully developed, and is susceptible to failing to do its job. I think of an analogy to how people can die of failing to breathe during a heroin overdose, wherein that same part of the brain is put into a state where it doesn't maintain a high enough breathing rate. I suspect the failure mechanism in the overdose situation and the SIDS situation might be analogous.
We had one and I think it made one or two false positives where basically it fell off. I can’t say anything about false negatives since none of our children stopped breathing. (It had two alerts, one for losing skin contact and one for low oxygen. The first one we got all the time when forgetting to pause the base station before removing the sock, so that bit certainly worked.)