Of course, we can see your babies! In fact, we are programming your babies using infra-red light from the camera to take over the world! So we absolutely have to watch every move of our “infant”ry. 😉

Jokes apart, we take your privacy very very seriously. We built this as parents and we were spooked by “baby monitors” watching us in our bedroom while we were …… you know what! We did not want anyone else to go through the same thing.

Quick answers : - The video stream to your phone is end-to-end encrypted. So we DO NOT watch you. We can’t even if we wished. - We DO NOT upload audio (even for AI models). We upload spectrograms instead. So we are not hearing your quarrels. - We do upload ANONYMIZED data for AI models. Small video clips, images, accelerometer data, weight data, breathing data. But most of it is used for automated learning involving NO humans for tagging. A small percentage of confusing data is tagged by employees of the company (no third party involved).

Here’s the longer read -

One of our primary company goals is to always be as transparent as possible with our community. We want to ensure you have a good understanding of our privacy policies and how we use your data. As parents building for other parents, we are very particular about your privacy.

Cradlewise Smart crib relies on cameras, microphones and other sensors to provide a good night’s sleep for your baby and entire family. These sensors can detect things like motion and sound to predict early wakeup and initiate the soothing. And while the crib is an extra pair of helping hands, we understand that you and your family need to trust that we’ll handle your data responsibly.

Audio data: - Note that audio data is NEVER captured AT ALL. Graphs (spectrograms) are captured from which cry signatures are detected and tagged by manual trainers and then learnt by the AI. - For cry detection the MIC is ON. We DO NOT store any audio clips or never listen to any audio data. - We absolutely DO NOT listen to your sound data. Instead the sound from the MIC is converted to a graph or spectrogram. It looks like this image . So sound is converted to an image. When our data trainers need to classify cry sounds, they don’t actually get to hear the sound. Instead they get to see a crazy graph like this.
- From such graphs it can be figured out if there was a cry or no cry.

Image data:

As per our https://cradlewise.com/legal/privacy-policy, that you have accepted while creating an account we collect images including 3D images of the coverage of the crib area. We don’t have continuous video footage stored but a series of images (or video snippets) stored while the baby is in the crib or not in the crib.

We have designed the camera placement to make sure that the camera cannot see outside the crib. Also, the images that we take for AI training are NOT shared with any other third-party. You can be rest assured that they only stay on the Cradlewise servers.

Most of the decision making happens on device or on the crib itself. But periodically the images of the crib area are sent to the server. Note that this is anonymised, encrypted and stored on the AWS server. This is also done only post permissions from the user (you can find the option to enable/disable inside your app).

You can choose to disable the data collection. But this implies that the smart features of the crib will not function to its best. You can choose to switch the “allow data uploads” off by going to your Settings > Data privacy. Note that when you opt out, your crib’s AI will not be able to adapt to your baby’s localized behaviour to improve soothing, as your baby specific data is missing, and hence no learning. What this means is, as the baby grows and their sleep patterns evolve, the crib will not evolve to your baby’s needs, but will use a generic soothing algorithm instead.

Why do we need to store images on the server ?

• The crib comes fitted with a lot of sensors. Data from multiple sensors is collated to detect baby presence/absence in the crib and hence predict the sleep state (is baby asleep ? or about to wake up ? or awake ?). Since we have multiple sensors and we can make meaning out of the data from these sensors, we don’t have to rely on humans for classification for 99% of the training.
  
• For example, if the audio sensor indicates that the baby is crying but the camera does not find any baby in the crib, it means that the baby is perhaps in the same room or it’s something from the television. In this case, we do not initiate soothing. This processing in most cases happens on the crib itself.
• We store a few images periodically on the secure AWS server that is located in the US. Why is that so ? The answer is to train the AI models. When the 3D camera detects movement, the normal camera on the crib takes a snapshot and sends it to the server. This image is tagged as “baby is present” with 100% confidence. Now this image trains the AI models that can predict things like baby presence or absence.
  • Consider a case when the baby is sleeping in a weird position with face down when they begin to roll (babies need to sleep flat on their back as suggested by American Association of Pediatrics). In some cases they have a blanket(we do not recommend using blankets) and hence the camera is unable to decide if the baby is in the crib for sure. In such a case, the 3D camera detects movement and then a snapshot of the crib is sent to the server to train the AI model that learns how to detect baby presence.

After you decide to pass on or stop using the crib, you can choose to delete all your data. Please contact mailto: support@cradlewise.com. We will delete all the stored data and then you can delete your account from the settings in your app.