Modern parenting faces unique challenges as families become more isolated and traditional support systems fade away. Ami Meoded, co-founder of littleone.care, introduces Elora – a revolutionary baby wellness monitor that goes beyond basic sleep tracking to provide 24/7 insights into infant development.
Meoded explains how Elora’s wearable technology analyzes baby movements and sounds to track key developmental metrics including activity levels, sleep patterns, and exposure to language. The device helps address modern parenting challenges by enabling multiple caregivers to stay connected through a shared app.
Drawing from personal experience of how early caregiving impacts development, Meoded discusses the importance of consistent, quality interactions in a baby’s first 24 months. Learn how technology can support (not replace) the fundamentals of parenting – smiling, hugging, and engaging with your child. Welcome to the future of parenting!
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About Ami Moeded
Ami is the CMO of Littleone.Care, a leading technology startup behind Elora, the first AI-powered and radiation-free pregnancy & baby wellness monitor, optimized to track and analyze key aspects of pregnancy and baby wellness in support of overall development.
He is involved in developing various technological products and software aimed at helping others in the area of digital marketing and customer behavior. Ami observes the parents & babies behavioral patterns while developing the next generation of cutting edge of baby technology.
He is also actively involved in promoting community health and well-being initiatives, consistently engaged in volunteering and organizing activities for teenagers, children, parents, and infants in his community.
Motivation and Inspiration
Ami Meoded’s inspiration for creating the Elora baby monitor comes from his personal experience. When he was born, his mother nearly died and had to stay in the hospital. As a result, he was raised by his aunt during his early months. This experience, which he didn’t learn about until he was in his mid-20s, showed him the tremendous impact early care can have on a child’s development.
This personal history led him to become deeply involved in early childhood development throughout his life – serving as head of the PTA, setting up daycares, establishing an elementary school, and working with various baby-focused brands. His mission to shape the future of parenting is driven by wanting to better understand and support this crucial period of child development.
Beyond Basic Baby Monitoring
Unlike traditional baby monitors that focus solely on night-time sleep, Elora tracks a baby’s activities 24/7. The device, worn like a tiny smartwatch on the baby’s clothing, analyzes movements and sounds to provide comprehensive insights into a child’s daily life. From sleep patterns to activity levels, feeding times to language exposure, parents can access detailed data about their baby’s development.
The Importance of Early Development
Research shows that the first 24 months of a baby’s life are crucial for long-term development. During this period, every interaction and experience can have lasting impacts. Elora helps parents track and optimize these crucial interactions, ensuring babies receive consistent, quality care.
Building a Connected Care Network
One of the most innovative aspects of Elora is its ability to connect multiple caregivers through a shared app. This feature helps recreate the village of support that modern families often lack, allowing grandparents, daycare providers, and other caregivers to stay informed and involved in the baby’s care.
Technology’s Role in the Future of Parenting
The fundamental message remains clear: technology should support, not replace, human interaction. As Meoded emphasizes, nothing can substitute for smiling at, hugging, and playing with your baby. The goal is to use data and insights to enhance these natural interactions and help parents make informed decisions about their baby’s care.
Call to Action
In an era where traditional family support systems are diminishing, technology is stepping in to help parents better understand and care for their babies. Remember, the goal isn’t to replace human interaction but to support and enhance it through informed decision-making.
It is a good time to evaluate your current support system and consider how tools could help you better understand and respond to your and your family’s needs.
If your children are slightly older, we suggest you check out our episode with Dr. Jason Kahn on the future of emotional regulation.
Links
- Ami Meoded – LinkedIn
- Littleone.care
- Littleone.care – Instagram
- Littleone.care – Facebook
- Littleone.care – TikTok
Transcription
This interview has been transcribed using AI technology. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, the transcription may contain errors.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Futurist Society, where as always, we are talking in the present, but talking about the future. So I have a really special guest today. His name is Ami Mayoded and he is the co-founder of littleone.care that sells a product called Elora, which is a baby monitor, as well as many other things. And I’m really excited because I have kids and hopefully some of you guys in the audience also have children. And we’re going to talk about how technology is going to affect them. So Ami, thank you so much for joining us.
Tell us a little bit about your product and how you got into this.
First of all, thank you for hosting me and enabling me to talk about our product. The Elora baby wellness monitor, which we created at littleone.care is actually the very first monitor that is trying to explain and understand the secret world of babies. Well, the parents would like to know what is going on with the babies, right?
They would like to understand how the baby slept at night, which most of the baby monitors, the thing they do, they track the night sleep. But we understood that the baby’s life happening 24-7 and not just during the night sleep. And we wanted to provide with parents highly detailed data and information and especially insights that will tell them a little bit more.
So what we have done, we created this tiny smartwatch. It’s kind of smartwatch for babies, but this tiny smartwatch has no screen. Babies doesn’t need to know the time when they wake up in the middle of the night and they don’t need to text to their friends, what about you?
I smartwatch has no screen since any information you want to look at, it’s in their parents’ cell phones app. So how does it work? This tiny device is attached to the baby’s shirt as a wearable device.
And it doesn’t come with the baby in touch with the baby’s skin. And the whole idea is to analyze the movements and the sounds of the baby to synchronize them and to tell using AI to tell the story of what had happened with your baby in the last 24 hours. It starts from safety issues that you will be alerted in real-time if you would like to use this feature.
And when I say safety issues is if the device doesn’t detect any motion or if the baby fall from a changing table or if somebody is screaming at the baby or if somebody got shake the baby, you would like to know about that at real time. But this is not enough because it’s not just about the fear of parents and safety features. This Elora is about explaining the parents, mapping the day of the baby, like sleeping hours, when you fed the baby, when you played with the baby, how much time you spent talking to the baby, how many words the baby heard today, how much time the baby spent in time in time.
Anything you can imagine that is either tell you what had happened with your baby when you were at work, for instance, or what you and any other caregiver was doing in order to improve or to support the baby’s development, okay, in terms of activities, speech acquisition, and the enjoyable time with the baby. So this is what we have done. This is the product, and it comes with an application.
The application includes all of this data, but we process the data in a way that we created the reports. We named them call to action insights. Very simple to understand report.
We realized that there is no reason to present information that you as a parent doesn’t know what to do about that. What can I do? My baby was crying.
But on the other hand, how much time your baby was active today, or if the routine was routine, or how many words your baby heard today, that kind of things are in your hands. As a parent, you can do something about that, right? So this is what we have done.
It was very important progress in the development of the product, and at the end of the day, if you would like me to summarize Elora, Elora is about four actions the baby does, like crying, sleeping, eating, and pooing. But at the end of the day, on the other side, it’s about your engagement with your baby, and it tells, did you read the baby’s story? Did you talk to your baby?
Did you play with your baby? Did you decide today to put your baby in tummy time? Which is a very important milestone in the baby’s development.
So it’s more about yourself and the other caregivers and their interaction with the baby, which is so important. In the first 24 months of the baby’s life, anything you’re going to do, it’s priceless in this period of time. Many researchers will tell how much the quality of care and the activity and anything you do in these first two months, the impact of them is tremendous, and for the long term, like lifetime, the impact of what you have done with your baby in the first two years of life.
So I’m a big fan of wearables. I wear an Apple Watch. I have two of them so that when I can put one on or take one off, then I put one right back on, and that’s helped me in my personal fitness journey.
The main thing is just because I’m tracking everything, right? So what are you guys able to track? The specific milestones that you’re talking about of how many words the baby is saying, how much tummy time, how is that measured?
Let’s talk about from the technological aspect. What do we do? We have several sensors in the Elora, and the sensors are several microphones, analogs and digital microphones, side by side with the acceleration sensors.
And we track the air quality around the baby. And these three are the main sensors. There are several other sensors, but these sensors generates the data that we use to analyze using AI what had happened.
We bring a context to that simple, very simple to measure data. I will give you an example. Let’s talk about acceleration only.
It can tell if the baby is on his back, no sounds around the baby, the belly goes up and down very quiet for the next two hours. You can assume the baby was asleep. We do not have any camera or visual feature that will tell us if the eyes are closed, but we can tell that the baby is resting.
Okay? Resting is kind of sleep. We can tell if the baby rolled to the right side or to the left side, which is very important for the development, symmetric development.
You can tell if the baby right now is in tummy time. We will add the ability to track the crawling and the walking and jumping and many other activities that we expect a baby to do, but this is the very first thing that you have to start in the first six months of life. But it’s not enough.
We can tell if you rock the baby, if the baby is in a car, different acceleration, or if you are walking with your baby in a stroller in the park. And it’s, again, another activity that you do with your baby. In terms of sound, we do not know what you said to your baby.
We do not know if you raised your voice, what you just said, but we know that you are either talking to a baby, singing to your baby, sorry to say screaming, which is inappropriate, but if somebody is screaming at your baby, or if the baby is crying, laughing in the future, we already work on that. We would like to create the connection between what you said to the expression of the first variables of your baby, like what the baby’s cooing in response to your talk, why it’s important. People don’t really know, but talking to babies is one of the most important activities.
And when I say talking to the baby, I mean that you are looking at your baby, and you talk, and your face expressions are changing because of what you just said. We have a baby talk in any language. We start to speak very slowly.
How do you feel? Because this is the way we are trying to explain. This is an instinct.
We’re trying to explain to our babies the differences between the different variables and words by expressing them in this way. But the moment you talk to a baby, neural connections happen in the baby’s brain. Actually, this is the most important muscle, if we can call it a muscle, that we really need to activate all the time.
Do you have any idea how many neural connections happen in the baby’s brain when you talk to them? One million every second. Again, it’s one million neural connections happen in the baby’s brain any time you talk to them every second.
Now, there is something very interesting we have heard in one of the researches that we, you know, we communicate with a lot of academic people because it’s a very interesting area to track the baby’s development. And one of the most important things I’ve heard, it’s about the dialogue that you can have with your baby. You can either talk over the head of the baby and talk to your spouse and say, prepare the food and we’ll take him to a shower and then we will feed him and watch something on TV.
This is to talk over the head of babies. Many parents does it, it’s not exactly talking to a baby. The baby is not part of the conversation.
There is another type of conversation that you talk to the baby and explain them the world. I’m going to change your diaper. Later on, we will go to the living room, grandma is there, we will sit next to her and we’ll watch telly together.
This is to talk to your baby. In such cases, one million neural connections happens every second in the baby’s brain. But there is another type of dialogue that is even more amazing.
What if you will be playing with your baby? And when your baby is cooing, you do what he just did. Or if he changes his face expression, your response is the same.
You will let your baby to lead the conversation. Well, something very interesting about that, the very same one million neural connections happens in the brain of the baby’s brain, but not at the same places. Other places that never light before.
And in that research that I was invited to take part in the closure of that research, and it was very interesting to hear that they tracked these kids for six years in that research. And they found out that the parents who let the baby to lead the dialogue with them, actually that research ended when the corona started, when the COVID started. They had to, and they used the COVID to understand how these kids, six years later, five years later, responded to that event that nobody was aware to.
Nobody know how to behave at the beginning, nobody know what to do. And they realized that these kids who were trained to lead the conversation with the parents, who understood that they can impact reality, when they raise their hands, the parents raise their hands. They understood they are not just individuals, they are individuals that can impact society.
They were the kids who help the daycare people to explain other kids why mask is important. They comfort them, they hug them, they were like natural leaders, because they were told in a very interesting way, you are a leader, you can impact, you can do something about that. So it was tremendous thing, and we decided that one of the most important thing will be to make parents talk and talk and talk to the babies.
In the past, before COVID, we used to go to work. Something was changing. Zoom and many other platforms enabled us to start work from home. It was like overnight. So why I’m saying that? We are in a risky situation right now. We are at home. We are at home. I’m working from home.
It sounds like you are with your family. But I think that it’s even more complicated than in the past, because nowadays we are at home, but we are not present. We are talking to the screens exactly like what you and I are doing right now.
So the baby can be in the living room, put on the carpet, but you are not present. And you might think, yeah, I’m with my family, but this is not the thing you should do. So we would like to reflect parents with this information.
And the main reason for that is very interesting. A while ago, I talked to one of the psychologists who knows us, and we talk a lot. And one of the sentences that was mentioned in this conversation that many young families, like two adults have a baby, and both of them overnight, just like that, and there is no workshop or lecture that will prepare you to become a parent.
Overnight, they become a parent. And what we said in that conversation, that one thing we missed, the moment you become a parent, it doesn’t mean that you are not anymore a kid. You’re still a kid.
And one of the things that happens, you bring into this new relationship with that new newborn, you bring anything you remember, or it doesn’t have to be a memory, it can be unconscious behavior, into that relationships. And anything you went through, you might do the very same thing, or even worse, or exactly the opposite. It’s like trying to fix what you went through, or to do better, and so on.
And I’m saying that because it might bring a different kind of feelings, like guilt feeling. Oh, I was at work. My father was 24 hours a day at work.
I’m not going to be like him. I was at work. I need to do more. I feel bad. Should we make more money, or you will stay more at home, and we’ll use our savings? And all of these conversations are not just realistic conversations, because they are an expression of what we went through, and we do not want to spoil or destroy our baby’s life, like we went through.
So, one of the things we decided we should do, we will reflect the parents in reality. Please, do not bring your issues into this new, fresh relationship. This is what had happened.
This is the simple report. Act accordingly. Do not add to that the anxiety feelings, your guilt feeling, and so on.
The idea is to enable you to create your best version of a parent in the next 24 months, because the funny thing is that these young persons that are just babies right now have no time. You cannot fix yourself and spend like one-third of the time in these 24 months, and only then, no, your baby is not waiting. He needs you, your best version in these 24 months.
So, we created this report, very simple to understand. You put the Laura in the docking station, and you see everything. It’s like your smartwatch tells you how many steps you had to take.
Good, bad, your decision to make. But this is the reality. Now, talk to yourself and decide what to do about that. But no anxiety feeling, no stories you tell yourself that will make it even more complicated. This is what we have done.
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of measuring things. I think that as human beings, naturally, if we start measuring things, we’re going to be more aware of them and then try to improve upon them. Like, for example, I have a Bluetooth scale, and every time I step on it, I know that, okay, I’m a little bit heavier than I was, I’m a little bit lighter than I was.
And so, it gives me the motivation. And I can totally see that impetus for doing the right things as a parent. Every parent wants to be the best parent that they can.
I just didn’t know that stuff like this was available. Over the past few years, though, you see a lot more of this tech coming into the space. Where do you see this?
Where do you see this trend of more technology in early development going?
Well, the current revolution, the current revolution, the AI revolution, it’s very tricky to predict what’s going to happen. I will share, you know, like, for instance, a couple of weeks ago, two weeks ago, nobody even imagined that a company like DeepSeek will kick in and will change what we understand about the complicity, energy, and infrastructure you need to have an AI engine that will do different kinds of things. So, even during this revolution, things are happening, and the ability to predict is a little bit tricky.
At the very same time, I would like to break this revolution to pieces. Before we talk about AI, and as I just said, while we talk, maybe there is another company that is going to make another extraordinary thing and to create an algorithm that nobody even imagined that can do so many things. This is one part of the revolution, and most of the engineering and mathematician people, my amazing partner, working on that.
Okay? This is one part, and any day, every day, something will happen. But there is another thing that nobody communicates about this revolution.
It’s about collecting the data, and it’s about to collect accurate and quality data. I will explain. What if you were born in the era where the camera was invented, but your parents didn’t take any picture?
There is cameras all over the place, there are video cameras all over the place, but nobody was thinking about taking pictures of you. And we are in the era where collecting the data became so cheap and so simple, physicians approach us and ask us to start medical trials, although we have no plan to become a medical device, but the moment you attach the Elora to the pregnant mom’s shirt or the baby’s shirt, you can collect a lot of data, very interesting data, over time. And it doesn’t mean if you are at the beginning of the AI revolution, two months later or two years later, the data, it’s the very same data, and the things that you can do with that data has a tremendous impact.
Because this data, and they come together with the algorithms of the AI and the neural networks that we always keep developing, together, we created a new world that can predict or prevent things that we couldn’t even imagine or measure in the past. So this revolution is about not just, oh my goodness, the AI is going to replace me, nobody needs me at work, it’s about the data as well. Part of the people are not aware of it.
I don’t need that, I don’t need to weigh myself, I don’t need to know what is my blood pressure, I don’t need to measure anything about my life, which is fine. But there is a group of people which is always just growing, that’s not just measuring themselves, the consistency of that, and understanding how cheap it is to collect and store this data, I think will put them in an advantage that the other people with this AI, since they don’t know the data, will never ever reach that point. So this revolution is very important, but collecting the data, it’s part of it, okay?
This is the way I see it.
Yeah, I wonder how much of this is going to be prescriptive though, you know, like the idea that you’re talking about where we have to have a certain amount of words that are present so that our baby develops appropriately. Now we have the ability to collect that data, in time we’ll have the ability to see what those outcomes are, and then eventually, you know, my goal is to have some sort of assistant that tells me, This is the best way to raise your kid. This is the optimal way to raise your kid. And you know, I see that happening in the fitness industry, you know, for example, like you have to have 10,000 steps.
I’m getting notifications on my watch that I need to do this, or, hey, you didn’t work out today. Maybe you should, you know, do that 30 minute walk that you have been avoiding. I hope that that happens for the development of children too, just because it’s so important.
Is that something that you think is on the horizon?
I will share with you what are the call to action reports, and it will be connected to what you just asked. And there are many other things that we are, that are under development. When you launch a product, you cannot launch everything at the same time.
You need to start with a few things and keep developing the next features. So the very first thing we have done is to present parents with information, how many words you may be heard today, or this week, or this month, according to what you just defined in the reports. What is the activity level of your baby?
Many caregivers, when the baby is awake, but it’s not crying, doing nothing. I’m sorry I’m saying that, but you can see that many of them would prefer to put the baby in the crib, in front of the telly, or with an iPad in their hands for the next, their wake hours, like can be half an hour or two hours, and nothing will happen. They just sit over there, staring at the telly, and not moving.
World Health Organization complains, begging the people, please play with your babies. And the claim is that this is the main reason for having overweight kids later on in the elementary school. Babies supposed to be all over the place at home, on the carpet, and to destroy the house.
This is what they need to do. And parents, as I said, I have one free hour, I will keep talking over Zoom, and so on. So this is a very important report, the activity level.
The air quality around your baby. Again, all of these reports, you can do something about it. The air quality of the baby, around your baby.
But there is some other report that I think you will find interesting. How much time you spend singing to your baby, and instead of just talking, which is important to the confidence of the baby, as a toddler in the daycare when everybody starts to sing over there, he knows that. It’s not the first time he understands singing.
And the other thing is, what is the reaction time? I will explain. Your baby cries fine.
When the baby is crying, it’s fine. This is the way they express themselves, and looking for your attention for any reason. However, the confidence of that baby at the home he is living at is not about the crying.
It’s about the consistency of care and the reaction time. For instance, if you will respond to your baby crying one day, five seconds, five hours later, two minutes, then 30 seconds, from the baby’s point of view, the secure feeling is not so good because he doesn’t really know when somebody will approach him. But if it’s a consistent thing, and it takes you 35 seconds, we don’t time parents.
In this report, you will never ever see, because we don’t want to time you. The idea is not to time you. You have a big house, it will take you 40 seconds, fine, good for you, but 40 seconds all the time.
Your baby needs to know that in 35 seconds, 40 seconds, 20 seconds, whatever it is, the hero, my parents will show up, and I will be more and more secure and feel okay with that, and I will cry less. The opposite is, when I don’t know what’s going to happen, first of all, I will cry faster, because I need to start earlier, because they might not show up. So this is the way to impact the confidence.
That kind of report was developed by people who deal with traumatized parents and kids, and they told us we do that, and we did it for them. So this is the report we’ve done. But more than that, reports are not enough.
We realize that part of the parents, the moment you will provide them data, any data, any type of data, will question it. And the idea is to provide with these parents the confidence, the idea that they are good, they’re fine, or what they need to do. So in our app, we created a huge feature that is not, you don’t have to, how to say that, you don’t have to have this feature in order to launch a product, but we forced ourselves to make it part of the MVP, where any, sorry, baby experts that you can imagine from different disciplines, speech therapists, occupation therapists, baby care specialists, breastfeeding experts, nutritionists, anyone can join the app, create an account, and you as the parents can, when you dig or start to investigate the data, you can actually communicate with them.
You can chat with them within the app if you want to enable them access your baby’s data. Right now, the way it works, you communicate with them, you pay them, but for the very first time, either you talk to the experts in the app, or you invite your own experts, but this is our way to enable you with any answer to your question. We could use chat GPT, and we already have a lot of features that using predictive AI to address a lot of issues, but the idea that we do believe that you need to hear a human voice, expert person, experienced mom, even experienced mom can be there, to tell you, oh my god, it’s fine, keep doing what you’re doing, you are okay, you need to hear that kind of things, and AI might say that, but we do believe that beside of the AI, sometimes you need to hear real human voice that’s been there, done that to give you the feeling you’re supposed to have.
Again, in these 24 months, it’s a very, very expensive period of time that we don’t want to spoil, destroy.
Yeah, I think any type of coaching during this time would be helpful. I mean, that’s coming as a first-time parent, I’m about to be a second-time parent, and I think that it’s always tough, and it’s nice to have that. I’m very bullish on technology in early developmental period.
I feel like, especially when we get humanoid robots, that’s going to be something that allows us to have much more quality time with our family. I think that there’s this big pushback against being a parent in general because of all of the difficulties raising a kid in 2025. If you see, even like movies, they just always talk about the negative aspects of it, and it’s difficult.
There’s a lot of administrative work, like there’s a lot of, you know, sleepless nights, lots of difficult things that you have to do to raise a baby nowadays. But on the same token, you have a certain segment of the population that’s very against technology in this period, that’s very anti-technology. What do you say to those people?
Because I know that this is something that you probably test shop this product to a lot of different people, and Elora is one among many of new technologies that’s coming into this space, but I see it as a very great thing. I’m very biased when it comes to technology in the household, but that’s me. What do you say to people who are less…
It is a very important question. The very first thing I would like to say, and I think it was my fault not to say it at the beginning. Any parents we talk to, we say, guys, smile, kiss, and hug your kids, talk to them, play with them.
This is the most important thing you can do with or without baby monitoring. Nothing will replace that. No AI and no technology will be able to replace your smile to your kids.
Play with them, smile to them, encourage them, right? This is one thing. At the very same time, technology in general is about to create an advantage that will release or will help you with different kinds of aspects and functionalities.
Parenting, which is a very important relationship with a new person in the world, cannot be replaced by none of them. Baby monitors, cameras, wearable devices will never ever replace parenting. However, you just mentioned how hard it is to raise a kid in 2025.
It happens a lot. In the past, one of the spouses didn’t work. The old auntie was living on the second floor.
Your grandma came to visit twice a day with hot food. The other neighbors always ask about your feelings, how is your wife. When they met her, they hugged her and even offered themselves to take the baby for an hour, since she needs to take a shower.
It doesn’t exist anymore. It doesn’t exist anymore. The loneliness, the babies are helpless, their parents even more.
One of the things we have done within the app, we are encouraging the parents to, unlike maybe other baby monitors that it’s yourself with the baby and the monitor, we encourage the parents to add to the app any possible caregiver. The baby is in the daycare with someone or a few people, make them join the app. You have a nanny, she has to be in the app.
Your spouse for sure, your grandma, anyone. Because we would like to put the baby in the center, like the old villages, and to enable everyone to support each other and the baby’s growth. This is one thing we have done.
The other thing I would like to talk about, it’s a very interesting feature we have in the Elora. If you remember, I told you that it’s about collecting data and targets. I will explain.
When you create data, indexes of data, and you would like to feed the AI, if you don’t have accurate data, or if the quality of the data is not good, there is a phrase in the AI world, garbage in, garbage out. No miracles. In this area, you cannot ask the baby, why did you run to the right?
Are you crying right now because you are unhappy? Why are you unhappy? What happened?
Are you hungry? You cannot ask the kids, the babies, about that. One of the other funny things is that the parents rape the reality.
They see something, although it might be different, they will convert it to the thing they want to see. I’m not saying the parents are lying, but in many occasions, the parents want to see something, this is what happened. We had to develop a way where we are targeting the data without making illegal things with babies, like take several babies, avoid them from sleeping, and to understand that this cry is an expression of tiredness, or do not change diapers for a while, and so on.
So what we have done, because we track sound and acceleration, we synchronize them. For example, and we didn’t release this feature, it’s about to be released, I hope, very soon, but we know the baby is crying, right? The specific baby is crying right now, but a couple of minutes later, the belly goes up and down, no movements, quiet around the baby, no light in the room.
We can assume that the baby falls asleep for the next two and a half hours. So what we do at that specific neural network of that baby, we can tag the last cry. And understand the connection between the two things, then to assume that the last cry we have heard is a cry that is an expression of tiredness, as well as if you fed the baby, as well if you change a diaper, and so on, in order to distinguish the cry because of pain.
When we talked about that with parents, they say, oh, you want to replace my instincts. We do not want to replace parents’ instincts, but parents behave like AI. You wake up at 2 a.m., your baby is crying. You try to feed him, doesn’t work. You try to change a diaper, doesn’t work. You rock the baby, doesn’t work.
And look at that from the baby’s point of view. Why do you take off my diaper when I’m in pain? Okay?
They don’t know what to do, and it makes them even cry more. And we would like to present, especially to unexperienced caregivers, that the baby is crying because of pain or because of tiredness, and we change, and Laura changes its colors, will change its colors according to the reason for crying. Deep blue, I want to sleep. Yellow, change my diaper, like pee. Green, feed me. And red, I’m in pain.
But we did that only to reduce the time that baby will be in pain, and you are trying other things. This is the reason we have done it. We are not against the parents’ instincts.
We are for them, but we are for consistency as well. I brought to my country Barney the Dinosaur, this amazing brand, Adora the Explorer, or I was involved in bringing Ninja Turtles, Jungle Book, and I have learned something very interesting. All of these games, books, and anything you brought with the brand, parents bought them because they really believed when they’ve been in the mall and you talk to them, because you always investigate your clients, they believe they’re going to take it home, open the box, use the DVD, whatever it was that day, or read the book.
But you communicate with them 10 days later. How are you? How do you do? How was the experience? Oh, we didn’t have time for that. I’m sorry, we will do it. I think we do it next weekend. Consistency is part of the game, and our role is to be there for you, to remind you this important gray word, consistency, by doing everything using routine and so on. The other thing we have done in order to tag the data without needing to data, anytime you touch the Laura, you can talk to your baby and say, oh, Jonathan, let’s change your diaper.
Oh, Jonathan, the diaper was wet. Oh, Jonathan, let’s have a banana, first time banana, or let’s have lunch, or let’s take a shower. Whatever you say, the moment you say it after you touch the Laura, it records this four-second sentence and converts it using speech-to-text into an event in the baby diary in the app.
So three things had happened. One, you don’t need to type anymore in the baby diary when you change the diaper or fed the baby, breastfeeding 20 minutes, left side. You don’t need to do that anymore.
No reason for divorce because your spouse doesn’t remember if you changed your diaper or fed the baby or not. But the other thing that happened, again, brings us to our important mission. We make parents talk to the babies.
I’m training you to talk to your baby, explain the world to your baby, communicate with your baby. But the last thing, from the technological point of view, you just tag the date and events. You just said you’re about to change your diaper.
We have the data of how you lift the baby to the changing table, spread the legs, done this, done that, enables us to take all of these noises and these accelerations into an algorithm that will tell next time, oh, yeah, I can see that although they didn’t tag it, but somebody checked the diaper. I don’t know if you changed it, but maybe just checked it. So this is what we have done.
The group of parents that believe in data because they see, predict the future where this data is going to be very important, I think we don’t need to convince them. The other group who, how to say that, trust, let’s say, would like to relay on their instincts, which we do promote and encourage, we are not replacing them, but they remind me the people who said in the past, I will never have a cell phone, especially my boss want to buy me a cell phone. I will never use that.
Nobody call me when I’m at home. But in the street, when they had the problem, they asked you to make a phone call. Later on, they decided they need their own phone.
I think we are in this stage, and I’m saying that, saying it under the next, how to say that, I’m saying it while understanding, and I’m very sensitive, and we are listening to these parents. One thing, issues of privacy are very important, strict privacy policies are really needed in this market, and we are tracking the GDPR, and we, in the U.S., there are several states with very strict privacy policies, safety, and no radiation. We do not, let’s say, we don’t have live streaming from the Elora.
No reason to tell you in real time that your baby was doing this or that at the middle of the day. Emergencies is another thing. One ping from the Elora, because somebody is shaking the baby right now, you should know about that if you want to activate it.
But no reason to have live streaming, go to work, put your baby at the hands of someone you really trust, and concentrate at what you do. Later on, come back home with new energies, fresh to be there for your baby, and spend a quality time with them.
Yeah, I think that’s a lot of the pushback that I would see, people that were not super interested in doing this, is because of the privacy concerns and the safety concerns. Yeah, absolutely, it’s very important. So, we’re getting close to our time, and I did want to talk with you about the three general questions that I tell, or ask all of my guests, which is, starting out with, what got you into this?
Because this is something that is a really interesting branch of technology, and I want to know, specifically for you, what was the reason why you chose to go in this direction?
Well, I think we should, I think this is the question, the why question is the most important in any new startup. The moment you know why you do the thing, anything, any other questions is important, but it’s something you will handle, it’s just a challenge, it’s not even a problem. When I was born, my mom almost died.
Yeah, try to imagine a situation where I was taken home, but my mom had to stay in the hospital. Now, nobody will do that, they will keep the baby at the hospital, but they released me, and she stayed in the hospital. So, my auntie took me into her home and raised me.
So, I didn’t know about this story when I was 28, I think, 25, 28. I heard something in the family, but nobody talked about that. And I don’t know why I was sitting with my father and my mom one day, and I just asked them, I came to visit, and I don’t know why, I said, what had happened?
I remember that type of story, and both of them answered me two different answers at the same time. My mom said, yeah, I was in the hospital for two weeks. And my father said at the same time, yeah, but your auntie raised me for six months.
And I realized that there is a story behind this story. And I realized that I cannot talk to them. Their first expression, especially my mom’s one, was do not talk about that.
It was a very sensitive issue for her. So, I went to my auntie, and that day, I just drove over there, knock on her door, hi. And there is something very interesting.
Anytime she hugged me, anytime she touched my hand or gave me a kiss, it was different. It was not like any other family I remember. I couldn’t explain it. It was something very warm, loving. So, I asked her, how long time I been here? And she told me things that my mom didn’t say.
My mom had depression after birth. She was part of the time spent in the hospital. She kept raising me. My mom came to visit, but I was there. And she didn’t want to tell me everything. Again, she was very, because she respected her sister.
And I didn’t want to push too much. So, I talked to her daughter. Her daughter is seven years older than me. She remembers here and there a few things, but she remembers that she was surprised because her parents gave her a gift, a new doll. I was the doll. And she played with me all day.
Why am I sharing with you this story? I have another two brothers and one sister. We are so different. So different. And the impact of this period of time is tremendous. If my aunt hugged me and played with me or whatever they’ve done over there, I don’t want to talk too much about my mom, but it’s a different environment.
My father was a screaming person. And it was a very tough house. And with my auntie, it was a gift to have this opportunity to start my life over there. We are so different in terms of communication and the way we see reality. Even the very same facts, we will see them in different ways.
So when you know such a thing, I didn’t mean that, but I always was dealing with babies in toddler’s life. Head of the PTA in my entire life. Set up daycares, because in my community, I was the one who was involved in setting up the daycare. Or I established elementary school. Elementary school in my community. And I was the one who established that. Head of the PTA till the end of the high school. Involved in many activities for toddlers and babies and so on. And I found myself involved in a company, production company, that brought to my country any brand you can imagine in the baby’s world.
It’s like a magnet. And when we started to discuss this business, my partner talked to me about it and said, let’s do it together. I did my best in order to make it not just a safety feature about possible emergencies.
I was doing my best in order to add to that anything that will discuss the well-being of babies. If you will ask me, what do I really want is to have a better understanding of this unique period of time. It’s like, there is no words to explain it.
And I think that nowadays, we are raising babies who will have this treasure in their hands. And maybe in the future, they will have more technology to work with it and do even more than we have done.
Yeah, it’s so funny that you say that. I was actually, my parents came over to this country, to the U.S. and they had my sister. And a year later, they had me. And so they were just overwhelmed. And in Indian families, it’s very common for you to live in a group setting. But in the U.S., they didn’t really have any of those social safety nets. And so my aunt and uncle raised me for the first few years of my life also.
And it’s so funny. It’s not until you said that, that I realized that I’ve always been interested in, like I do pediatric craniofacial surgery. And I’ve always been interested in neurodevelopment. It’s something that has always been of interest to me. So very cool to hear your side of it.
And hopefully, we create a world where children have all of the tools and all of the resources they need, whether it’s social or nutritional or whatever, to be the best that they can be. I think that that’s something that I see as an outsider that technology is now focusing on, right? Like the boom of the internet was very much distancing ourselves from those social connections.
And I see a lot more of that happening where it’s kind of retracting in on itself. And now you have, whether it’s your company or a lot of the newer baby monitors that basically allow for better and more accurate data coming from the baby, I think that that’s gonna just make the whole family unit a lot stronger. So thanks for sharing that with us.
Second question that I have is like, where do you see this whole industry in 10 years? When we’re talking about just baby technology, the idea of using technology to make babies more successful, more healthy, more maximize their potential. What do you see the field trending in? And what is it gonna look like for a parent in 2035?
Well, nowadays we walk anywhere we go with our cell phones. And in the past, when the cell phone just started, many people lost them. Less and less people are losing their cell phone.
They will lose their head and not their cell phones. What I’m trying to say that wearables is not, it’s wearable devices or wearable devices as part of what we wear, like part of your shirts. On the shoulders, you will be able to collect the sun energy to have more energy to your whatever you’re doing that measure your vital side by side with the communicating or instant messaging and so on.
So wearable devices are gonna be all over the place. I think we are just at the beginning of that era. If you remember, it was iPin, or I don’t remember the pin that we used, that a huge company that started with a lot of PR activity, people who was working for Apple and this company failed, it was too early.
And baby people were not mature enough to use such a technology that will replace the phones and everything. And the products maybe was not mature enough either. This is another thing, but something else is happening.
Many Western world countries are having less and less babies. So something very interesting is actually happening. Many, we have more money, less kids, which means that people, families that wanna have baby will invest in that baby much more than used to in the past.
In the past, sorry for saying that, you can have a family with 10 kids, but no investments. And the kids who has survived, hopefully all of them survived. Nowadays you will have one infant and the investment in that infant from even in the personal level and not just the community and the government is tremendous.
So by saying that and understanding what technology can bring with, that kind of thing will happen. What do we do about it? We would like to be in a place where we have set of data that will impact the development charts.
Nowadays, the development charts are very simple to understand, use two or three variables of your heights, the baby’s height, weight, and the scale size. And there are no measurement of, and the connection, maybe there is a connection, nobody even know about the level of activity, routine, feeding, crying. And maybe there are partners that the moment they happened, you should be aware of, or you should do that.
And this is one of the thing you wanna do. That’s why we have neurologists that are specialized in baby’s development in our advisory board. And this is the vision of the company.
We wanna be in the place where you will be able to predict and understand things because of events that keep happening in the baby’s life in early stages. And instead of waiting the next three, four years before somebody will tell you what is going on with your baby in terms of development to see that earlier. And it’s not anymore about the quality of life of the baby.
It’s the quality of life of the whole family because you deal with something much more earlier. At the very same time, we are going to use the very same product in order to tell parents what is the user experience of babies. If I will have again, 100,000 babies in the US, just in the US, it’s enough.
We are not a product company. People think we are product company. No, all we need is 100,000 babies because the moment you will have them, we will be able to map the $400 billion baby market.
I will explain, car seats, baby’s formula. Try to imagine that we will be able to say, oh my goodness, this baby formula, you feed the average baby. You feed the baby, fall asleep, wake up, want to play, want to eat, everybody are happy.
The other baby formula, this baby formula, it’s like a nightmare to feed the babies. Why? The average baby. Why? Because they don’t like to eat. They don’t sleep well. They cry all day. Or the car seat. In this car seat, I have no idea why, although it was very, very popular since one of the influencers promoted it on Instagram, but the babies keep crying.
On the other side, the other car seats, 10 minutes in the bridge, baby fall asleep when you drive with the car. So nobody knows how to compare that kind of thing because you won’t buy 16 different car seats or you will try all type of foods, but we will see that and we track stuff that nobody did in the past, okay? So this is the things that, and I think people would like to know that.
And Wearables, let’s say, if we will be a successful company, the big challenge is not just to convince you, use this Elora in the early stages, is to create another version over the very same hardware, another version of the software when your baby is already 24 months old to present you a value that will make you and your baby to want to keep the Elora with you. For instance, to connect between your quality time with your baby to the baby expression of different kinds of colors, ability to count to 10 or to express or to name other different kinds of things. And we will show you, oh, you see, you read that book.
He knows what is an elephant or he knows what is purple and so on and so on and so on. And again, it’s about, I think the technology is mature enough. The issue is our, as a society, matureness.
And after you have the early adopter and you see that this early adopter is due to the cell phone, save some time while driving the head, the meeting, you say, oh, I want a cell phone too. And the other people will join the game.
This is the way I see that. That’s great. I really hope to live in that world.
I plan on having more children. And so hopefully we can have more technologically based children that improve their outcomes. So kudos to you for that.
Last question that I ask everybody is that, obviously you’re in this space. What other technology are you super interested in? Because it’s like, for example, for me, I’m in the medical space and I just can’t get enough of robots.
I look at them in my hobby time. I’m really excited to see when we have humanoid robots that are able to help us and do things like wash our dishes and stuff like that. But what about you, Amir?
Other than wearables, other than baby technology, what is the news giving you that you’re really excited about?
I think there is another revolution that we are not really, it’s less people talk about that. The race to find a solution for COVID created a tremendous understanding of the bricks of the DNA of the human or not just human DNA and RNA. And I think that nobody talk about it right now because in many occasions, that kind of research just takes several years.
And I think that if the COVID was in 2020, usually it’s eight years later, seven years later, they start to provide approval because it’s not an emergency anymore. But if we are in 2025, two years from now, the world is going to be explode with new way to treat cancer. And I think this is the revolution everybody is waiting for because the impact is directly on our body.
I was involved in setting up one of the companies in this area. I just helped these two guys to establish a company. I have no knowledge in computing, in biological computing and so on.
But yeah, it’s a very interesting world. I’m involved in this company, but I have no idea what… To be part of a company that you don’t know what they do, it’s a good stage in your life. But I think it’s gonna be there. There are a lot of moral issues that will come with it. At the very same time, I think many diseases that’s nowadays, we’re still very frustrated. People die because of them, destroy families. I think that in the next couple of years, this world is going to be changed. I think this is the real revolution.
But again, it’s not something that everybody see and you can play with HHPT to be amazed of. We are talking about great people who work so hard in the wet laboratories to do something, to make a point and they need to wait another eight years to make sure that it works because they need to go through regulation, very strict regulation. But this is the next revolution.
And I’m sorry to say that the booster was the COVID.
Yeah, no, I think that you’re absolutely correct. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is like the center of biotechnology. And last year we cured sickle cell disease, right?
Like that was this thing that we learned about in medical school for years and years. It was this indelible thing for a certain select population of people and now it’s gone. I mean, it’s not gone, but like we have a cure for it.
And I mean, we’re transplanting pig kidneys in people. Like there’s a lot of amazing stuff that’s happening in the medical space, the biotechnology space. So I agree with you. There’s a lot more yet to come. So we’ll all keep a lookout for that. And so thank you so much for coming on today.
You know, all the best to you guys at Elora, you know, all the best to you and all of your endeavors. And to our listeners, you know, we would love to have you like and subscribe and we would like to see more of you. If you have any questions for Ami or for me, please feel free to reach out and we’ll try to get them answered.
And for those of you guys who are listening on a regular basis, we will see you in the future. Thanks everybody. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you. Thank you for hosting me.
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