Use your (old?) iPhone as a baby monitor with Evoz

I picked this one up via Martin Perez over at IntoMobile:

The Evoz app will let you turn your iOS device into a listening device for your baby monitor. It’s software-only for now but the company will be releasing its own hardware baby monitor later this year that can keep you connected with your device over WiFi. Just being able to listen to a monitor on your phone is neat but the company also includes some good tools which could come in handy.

via Evoz app turns your iPhone into a baby monitor.

Now then, here’s the screenshot:

This pretty much tells you what you need to know. Evoz appears to be targeted at the legions of iPhone-owning parents. I think this is a good strategy.

Evoz enables your iPhone to do the listening — taking the place of a standard baby monitor. There’s a bit of jiggery-pokery high tech gubbins going on at the backend apparently to parse crying from standard noise. The geek in me reacts positively to that — and the ability to get all sorts of ‘stats’ on the baby’s wellbeing.

If you’re a newish parent, you’ll know that — actually — the number one stat is ‘did he/she sleep through the night?’

There’s usually at least one slightly annoying baby in your social circle who sleeps through the night *from birth*.

However I think the further information that could be gleaned from this app might well be rather useful. I know, for instance, that little Archie, our 13-month-old boy, has got a cough at the moment. One of those seriously frustrating dry cough things that isn’t ‘illness’ (the doctor says all is good, there’s no infection). Archie just coughs. A lot. So much so that instead of sleeping through the night he’s been routinely waking up at about midnight or 2am. Meaning my wife and I are ALSO up. For about an hour or so trying to get him to *stop* coughing, relax and sleep. And we’re trying to do this without administering too much Calpol. Or Jack Daniels*.

At the moment he’s coughing now and again throughout the night but generally he’s not woken himself up too much recently. This is good — however I’ve nothing but anecdotal memories to go on here.

If we had this app running across the night, I think it would give us a good picture on how interrupted his sleep was — and, across a week or two, perhaps demonstrate that he’s getting better (or not, as the case may be).

The big challenge with Evoz is that you need an iPhone. That iPhone has to be plugged in (battery = shit) and, you have to HOPE that no one decides to phone it. Even if it’s on vibrate, it’s still going to wake the child up.

So you really want to be using a secondary iPhone. Perhaps an older generation one. Not many folk have spare iPhones, I know this. You could use an iPod Touch. Or, soon, you can use the dedicated Evoz monitor that will connect to your iPhone.

I do have a spare iPhone so I’m going to try it out tomorrow night if I remember.

Incidentally, the app will also email/text you if it detects crying. And, of course, you can listen-in from work, or anywhere for that matter.

You can download the app here:  iTunes Link and find out more about Evoz at myevoz.com/get-evoz.