Baby Care Reminder App

Some parents would decide to quit their jobs as the family welcomes a newborn baby, thus they transform from a full-time professional to a full-time parent. Naturally, their spouse and other family members would generally expect those stay-at-home parents to be fully in charge of looking after the children, sometimes even the housework, burdening them with the responsibility of handling all the baby care work, standing by 24/7.

Mental Burden

Without the resource for extra help, those full-time parents are usually busy, exhausted, and lonely when their partner leaves for work. They no longer own personal time, and worse, even the precious time spent with their beloved baby puts them in a constantly anxious state, overriding their joy. Fairly speaking, their minds are on duty all day long.

“Focus Time”

To free those main caregivers from their mental cage, we would like to clear up periods of “focus time” from day to day for them – which means, worry-free time for personal wellness, and high-quality time for bonding and being with their children.

We interviewed 5 main caregivers, including full-time parents and self employed, to gain insights into this project.

WOBY: Your Reminder Helper

So, how do we clear away worries and make “focus” time for the main caregiver? Let me introduce our assistant application, WOBY – “Watch Out Baby”.

WOBY is an all-rounder assistant application for baby care. Caregivers can set daily to-do lists, check the schedules of both the baby and the caregiver, and get reminders for the tasks; partnering with WOBY’s exclusive baby monitor camera, Cubo, WOBY also sends safety warning when the camera detects that the baby is in danger (e.g. when the baby is sleeping on all fours and covering up their own nose).

The connected camera, Cubo, would be set beside the cradle, detecting any danger signal and offering options of video-recording/photo-taking anytime.

WOBY offers a considerate option for the main caregiver to switch all the reminders with a single click to another caregiver’s phone (the spouse, for instance); and all the notifications are integrated and sent to one device so they won’t bother other caregivers when they are off-schedule.

Besides, through the partnered camera, Cubo, WOBY is also capable of playing music and taking photos remotely, allowing full-time parents to easily put their babies to sleep and look after them without being in the same room.

The Simplest Ever

As an assistant app designed for full-time parents, WOBY keeps all the settings, actions and recordings as simple as possible, taking the nuisance of note-taking out of the caregiver’s hands, allowing them to stay full-time focused on their baby (if not 24/7.)

With WOBY, full-time parents are empowered to enjoy every minute — as “focus time” — in their lives, including the time spent playing with babies, and the personal time they deserve. The timed tasks also help in putting the babies on a schedule, giving those stay-at-home parents a higher chance to get back to work earlier.

Focus Time & Simple-to-use & Regular Schedule

Here are three scenarios where WOBY can help.

1. Must-have: Safety Warning

A safety warning is sent to the caregiver, who is not physically in the same room as her baby when the baby is about to fall out of the bed.

2. Core Function: Task Reminder

The caregiver receives a notification for feeding the baby – with a simple click, she checks it to mark as completed.

3. Nice-to-have: Remote Control of Music Playing

A task reminder for waking the baby, with an option to play the music remotely with the multi-functional camera, Cubo.

Each Baby Differs?

Our test subjects echoed strongly towards our two core concepts: “simple-to-use” and “focus time” – they believed that WOBY could fulfill their needs. However, they also mentioned that they doubted whether the babies’ to-do tasks can be timed (“You know, their mood swings.”)

During the pre-project research, we did find that the regularities of each baby are highly different, so are the extent as to how much their parents want to set a regular schedule for them. WOBY is appreciated by those families who have relatively regular schedules, but we might need to research broader and further into infant habits, so as to develop a refined resolution for all baby caregivers.

**Duration**
2021/02 – 2021/04
**Instructor**
Dr. Neng-Hao Yu
**Team Leader**
Hsin-Ming Chao
**Team Members**
Chien-I Chao, Hsien-Chang Chen, Feng-Hua Chen

My team designed this application in the course Fundamentals of Interaction Design (II), which was under NTUST Design. The topic of this design challenge was proposed by Chia-Yu Chen, the Product/UX designer at CuboAi.

# Personal contribution: team lead, user research, storyboard story, app sitemap & user flows, UI wireframes, prototype testing, usability & function optimization

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