The technology revolution has come to this: Should diaper-changing pads have touchscreens and artificial intelligence?
Enter the Woddle. It’s a cradle-like home diaper station with a difference: Sprouting from one of its longer edges is a smartphone-like display. But who the heck wants to deal with a screen while also contending with fecal explosions and assorted tinkles?
Ah, that is exactly the point, says Shaker Rawan, founder of Silicon Valley-based Woddle Baby.
The $300 Woddle is designed to make data input easy. A scale is built in. Urination and bowel movements are logged with a few touchscreen taps, as are feeding and sleep timers. Over time, parents build a hyper-accurate record of baby vitals that they can pull up on their smartphones and share with their pediatricians.
The Woddle has limited AI. A bot built into the Woddle’s smartphone app can take questions and, sometimes grudgingly, dispense answers. The Woddle also has an adjustable warmer, a multi-hued nightlight, a white-noise generator and lullaby and classical-music streaming, all at the tap of a button.
Woddle Baby sent the Pioneer Press a review unit, and we turned it over to a St. Paul couple with a newborn for a tryout. See their report later in this article.
A ‘failure to thrive’
Rawan was inspired by his own fatherhood to create the Woddle.
His second child experienced a “failure to thrive” situation while very young because he was unable to feed normally and therefore lost weight catastrophically. He is a “healthy little dude” now, but Rawan remembers as a technology worker a great hunger to gather data about his faltering kiddo and feed that information to the doctors.
“And so I built this kind of 3D-printed box, put some sensors in there, took a phone that I hacked for the brains to tell me if he’s, like, trending up, trending down or is he kind of stable?” Rawan said.
That was one of the first Woddle-like setups.
The touchscreen control panel for a Woddle. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
The problem? Where to plug in so doctors can play along.
“The health care system, the way it works is that these systems are very old, databases,” Rawan said. “They’re not designed to really create proper trends in short bursts, meaning that, like, they don’t do trends over a week or a month. They do trends over years.”
So, Woddle Baby went about building relationships. This year, it will be working with more than two dozen health systems in the United States so that customers can opt in to share their babies’ vitals via their Woddle devices. (None are in Minnesota.)
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Meanwhile, the Woddle itself will continue to improve.
“We’ve started to introduce new functionality that wasn’t there out of the box. There had been a basic music file that would play white noise, but now you can stream lullabies and classical music,” Rawan said. “The warmer had been set to a specific temperature. Now you can adjust it.”
But Rawan cautions: “Woddle is a new category of product, (and) not something that already exists. ‘Smart Changing Pad’ does not exist and we are building it. The goal is to have devices that connect to health care and use AI to monitor a child’s health.”
Rawan believes that “parenting trends show a strong adoption for baby tracking with over 6 million families using some kind of a data tracker for their kids.”
A St. Paul couple
So, will parents go for the Woddle? We asked a St. Paul couple to try it out.
For their baby Grey three years ago, Amalia and Drake Prohofsky kept their diaper-changing scenario simple: They procured one of those rubbery, peanut-shaped Keekaroo changing pads from their neighborhood Buy Nothing group.
Baby Tavy this year got “the world’s smartest changing pad” for a time. Amalia, though nerdy to her core, was skeptical of the Woddle.
Amalia Prohofsky and three-month-old Tavy test out a Woddle in their St. Paul home. The Woddle has a built in scale, a warmer and an adjustable night light, in addition to apps to help you track diaper changes, naps and feedings. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
“So as you know, my first reaction when I saw this changing pad was, ‘That’s the most ridiculous piece of baby gear I have ever seen,’” she said.
“To start with, I’ve never felt the need to track my baby’s diaper changes, and also I’m not the type of person who is going to drop $300 on a changing pad,” Amalia said. “But I was prepared to be won over by the Woddle.”
Here are some of Amalia’s thoughts:
Yay for the integrated warmer! “My first kid detested being cold and sobbed during diaper changes,” she said. “My current kid doesn’t seem to care, but it’s still such a great feature.”
The Woddle “definitely makes tracking diaper changes and weight easy,” she said. “The tiny screen is super basic; just a couple buttons while you’re already standing there and it’s done.”
The nightlight feature is nice for a nursery, “but the placement of the light is not effective for lighting up a butt for a midnight diaper change,” so you need an additional light anyway.
“We also felt that the changing pad didn’t have enough cushioning,” Amalia said. “Getting a onesie over a newborn’s head is not an easy process; I don’t want to worry about banging his head on the hard surface of the pad while I’m doing it.”
“We found the placement of the screen on the Woddle really annoying,” she said. “It’s between parent and baby — and even though it’s small, stuff catches on it. Also, my baby keeps pushing buttons on the screen. He’s 2 months old, so this is far from intentional. Often he clicks buttons we can’t unclick (no back button), and then the screen is useless until we can finish what he started (recalibrating the scale, reconnecting to the phone app, other time-consuming inconvenient things).”
Like so many gadgets and apps these days, the Woddle has AI built in. That is, users can tap to ask the phone app questions, and often get useful replies.
Tavy and his mom, Amalia Prohofsky, test out a Woddle in their St. Paul home. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
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“I was a little relieved to find that the pad itself isn’t actually AI,” Amalia said. “You need the phone app for that. The bot seems solid — reassuringly worded and accurate responses. It refused to give me the dosage info for Tylenol and directed me to talk to my child’s doctor.”
Questions the Woddle did answer: “How often is normal for a baby to poop?” “What are the two-month milestones?” “Why are the whites of his eyes blue?”
The Woddle potentially comes into its own, Amalia and Drake agree, with babies who have problems that need to be reported accurately and often to doctors.
“But for a standard healthy baby, I don’t see it having as much use because you don’t really care” as much, Drake said. He and Amalia give it a thumbs down for their average household.
“The Keekaroo died a rubbery death, so now I’m using an ancient foam thing that came out of my parents’ basement,” Amalia said.
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