Right. ICU = Intensive Care Unit. Well, that is basically what these digital pajamas do. Offer intensive observation for your perfectly healthy baby to satisfy your perfectly paranoid mind. Tracking infant ECG's to a laptop or smart phone....Rogers!?...World!?...are you out of your mind!? This product has obviously emerged to appeal to the increasingly large number of vulnerable parents terrified by the concept of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which is the unexplained death of infants, often when they are sleeping.
I was chatting with a pregnant friend last night. She had just returned from a week-end camping trip with two other couples and their infants. Both babies under 1 year old, one of them under 2 months old. She explained the quiet nights, the relaxed attitude, the fresh coastal air, the snuggly babes wrapped in down and little red noses peaking out. She explained that the babes slept with their parents, in a sleeping bag, in tents, in the woods.
The fact that this was (a) shocking to me and (b) heroic is a reflection of how we have evolved in our precautions around infant sleep...and our attitudes - in general - about modern medicine, health and mortality. To be totally honest, I don't buy into it. And this is a personal thing. For me, and for everyone. This is really not a discussion to delve into here, but I can't help but question our obsession with monitoring every breath we take towards the ultimate goal of longer life. Traditionally, medical interventions have been intended to save or prolong life. Now, they are being designed to confirm it?
Yes, they are still breathing. Yes, their heart is still beating.
This is an especially dominant theme when it comes to infants. You often see health professionals reliant on monitors (at times when it is not necessary), and this leads to parental dependence as well. I hear lots of mums say "I want that monitor the whole time" as they are going into labour. And what is often over-looked is the false sense of control that this technology offers, not to mention the potentially harmful side-effects or unnecessary (and also potentially harmful) interventions that are correlated with hyper-monitoring. Technology is not always the most accurate. Everyone who has used a manual blood-pressure cuff knows this! It is more reliable, but not as fast, and requires human skill. God forbid we actually had to use our hands and ears to assess a person.
We - as health care professionals, as mothers, as parents and as human beings - are losing our senses. What happened to sensing and feeling. To intuition, touch and pain.
Perhaps this rant (I fully admit to this heavily biased diatribe) was unjustified. After all, we are all just humans adapting to the norms of our society, and protecting our young. And until the FDA approves this contraption, who am I to freak out about it's popular use.
But I can say - for sure - that despite everything I have learned and had to teach to new mum's about infant sleep (never in a fluffy blanket or sleeping bag, never on top of or next to mum or dad while they sleep, never on their side, never in the same bed...), the image of my friends nested in down with their sweet sleeping baby was magical to me. I guess because I feel more and more people will be less likely to do this after hearing nurses (like me) caution them about all the ways they shouldn't sleep with their babies as they are leaving hospital doors and entering the wild world.
But let's face it. Most parents are too tired to listen. And most parents will choose not to. Because no matter how hard people try, nobody can tell someone how to be a parent. And I can only hope to ignore (some) of the paranoia that my nursing education has inevitably indoctrinated me with so that when my children look back at family photos, they will be of crazy family adventures in the woods. and minus the space-age pajamas.
Because they will most likely live to see those family photos without them.
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Baby PJs fitted with heart monitors, motion sensors
Toronto—
The Canadian Press
Published 
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