Crying and wailing babies are every parent’s nightmare, specially for the mother. Many times it is difficult for the mother to comprehend why her few months old child is refusing to stop crying. To help such mothers and young parents, Korean startup Deeply is launching a baby monitoring solution based on sound analysis called ‘Lumi’ in December 2018. The startup has renamed it to ‘Waah’ recently.
Useful product for new parents
Deeply is a developer of Voice Analysis AI technology, capable of analysing non-verbal sounds and extracting information. With its new product the startup aims to solve difficulties in childcare. Waah is an AI –based crying-aware baby app that can interpret the cries and whimpers of a child and determine their needs.
Deeply developed the product after thorough research and analysis. The team of the startup recorded baby cries in the age group of 3 to 6 months. They collected 100,000 baby voice data from hospitals, postpartum care homes, and so on to determine what emotions and conditions the extracted voice represented, and then used Artificial Intelligence to find out the characteristics of each type of voice. As a result, the baby ‘s six different expressions of the hunger, sleepiness, inconvenience, trim, pain, temperature and humidity problems, were analysed. The current data has put the result accuracy at 90%.
The app will apply the deep-learning AI technology to the Internet (IoT) device to monitor the environment around the baby in real time and will communicate about the baby to the parents. Waah consists of a device and a smartphone app. The device works by detecting the baby’s voice among various sounds mixed in everyday and sending it to the cloud server. The voice data is analysed and sent to the parents to see the results through their smartphone app.
Breaking Barriers in the Baby Monitor Market
Deeply plans to challenge the US Baby Monitor market. Currently, the size of the baby monitoring market in North America is about $1.7 billion or 2 trillion won. Deeply participated in CES 2020 in USA in January to showcase the product.
Deeply wants to further expand its business into healthcare and biotechnology by analysing human emotions and health through nonverbal voice signals. The startup has received its seed funding of 300 million won or $ 264k from Accelerator New Flight.
With launch of Waah, Deeply hopes to create a wide market for new parents and it aims to upgrade the voice analysis technology so that it can even be utilised for adult healthcare purposes.
