The Daily - Health Trackers Are Everywhere. Do Babies Need Them, Too?

0:00From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. More and more people are wearing technology, fitness bands, smart rings, biometric shirts. These devices help track everything, from the heart rate to even the temperature of their skin. The latest frontier, health tech for babies. And it's being supercharged by AI. And so today, my colleague Sapna Mashwari tells us about her family's experience with all of this health tracking technology. And we discuss whether it's helping us just adding to our anxieties or maybe both. It's Wednesday, September 23rd. Okay, so Sapna, as you know, we are here today to talk about not just wearable technology, but all kinds of technology that helps you track health data. And I just want to lay my cards out on the table and say that I

1:07don't use any of this stuff. I don't have an Apple watch. I don't use an Aura ring. I'm very much of the mindset that I don't need to spend $300 on some kind of piece of jewelry that's going to tell me that if I drink, I won't sleep very well. So do you think by the end of this episode, I will realize the error of my ways or will I be more set on them? Great question. I don't know how you're going to feel, but I can tell you that I never thought I would be using a bunch of this technology or that my family would. And it all kind of crept into my life. How so?

1:35So, I'm a mother of two. And when my first kid was born about four years ago, I was looking for a baby monitor. And at that time, as I did my research, everyone kept recommending this monitor called the NANET. The NANET, okay. And tell us what the NANET does.

1:51So the Nanna is a baby monitor that hooks up to your home Wi-Fi and lives as an app on your phone. It's kind of like the eye of Sauron. It's grabbing data from the video footage and, and logging. Webs for the eye of Sauron? Is that really what you want watching your baby? Well, you know, you might, you might not think so at first, but it was pretty amazing. So you open this app and the app is tracking the baby's movements.

2:19Logs when they woke up when they fell asleep it can see when their eyes open and close It's looking at all of these movements and sleep patterns of your baby. And then it's putting it into this digestible format for any parent. So my husband and I would open the app and we would look at the insights tab and we would see, okay, how many times did we visit our baby overnight? How many hours of sleep did she get? How many times did she wake up? And when she woke up, how long was she awake before she put herself back to sleep? And so from this app, you can check on your baby from anywhere, whether you're at home

2:54or at the grocery store or maybe even at your office. And one of the things that hooked us on this app was the video camera would make these cute montages of these moments of greeting our daughter in the morning and this look of joy on her face as we picked her up. And the Nana is just one of many of these baby tech products.

3:13There's a really big rival of Nannette called the Owlet and that tracks a baby's pulse through a sock. A sock? Through a sock that they can wear. Like literally in the foot, that's what they're like, oh wow. There's a sensor in the sock. There's an app that tracks feedings and diaper changes and with that information markets an AI chatbot to parents who want to understand their baby's habits. There's monitors that send alerts to parents when their baby's face might be covered in the crib and on and on.

3:44Across the board, I would say these apps are feeding off parents anxiety, their questions, the sort of persistent, is this normal? Yeah, no, this is so interesting just because I just had dinner with a couple friends of mine and the husband was saying that he couldn't sleep with his newborn because he was so worried that...

4:02The newborn would stop breathing and kept checking in the middle of the night. And the only thing that allowed him to sleep was it turned out he bought a NANET because he was like, okay, I can sleep because this thing will alert me if my kid stops breathing. And so I know I can actually sleep because I'll get woken up if there's a problem. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's the running theme with all of these products is they tap into a new parent's desire for more sleep. Anyone with an infant knows that sleep is sort of this holy grail when you have an infant in the home. And there's a lot of other anxieties that

4:31that they promised to sort of solve. And I noticed this really with my second child when we bought another NANET that it had started incorporating more AI into the app where it wasn't just giving me feedback on what happened or monitoring them, but it was now giving me actual advice. I mean, including when they should sleep next or how we should interpret different things that they're doing in their crib. And of course, all of these products are are trying to sell you the advice with a subscription fee a lot of the time. And it started raising these questions for me around, okay, when should we trust our own instincts versus artificial intelligence when it comes to decision making around our kids' health? And on top of that, how should we think about AI when it comes to our own health? So as I was marketed all of these different forms of advice on how to

5:27watch over my child, I decided I wanted to know more about this company, whose products stare at my kids all night. And it turns out it has way bigger ambitions around AI and how to use the data. So I went to interview the CEO, Anushka Salinas, at the Nanna office in New York. Well, yeah, I loved learning more about what Nanna's up to. And what did you learn? What did she tell you about the company?

5:50So Selena sees a lot of potential in the data that Nana is collecting and the insights that they can give parents over time. develops between the ages of zero and five. It's when their brain is most plastic and yet kids are going to the pediatrician basically once a year for a checkup. 22 minutes is the average amount of time that that checkup lasts and yet children are sort of developing every single day. Obviously we both know this having two young kids and so we have this infrastructure and opportunity to unlock this black box that's the first five years of life that exists today.

6:24And the message that Nana is pushing is that there is a black box around this stage of a child growing as they develop motor skills, as they learn to talk, as they engage with the world around them. So why isn't there more information around this? And what they're saying is, Nana.

6:42can provide that information. Right now, the company is focused on sleep and babies, but it wants to expand beyond sleep into a kid's overall health and development. And investors see that potential as well. Nanit just raised another $50 million last year, and its CEO says that with more data, the company can help parents ultimately make better decisions for their kids.

7:10People have questions every single day, multiple times a day. Is this normal? Should my child be doing this? How do I handle that? Her argument is if you look at modern parenting today, people are Googling, they're turning to Reddit, they're now asking chat GPT. Sure. What she's saying and what Nana is saying is this device is collecting this personalized, really specific information about your child. And so Nana has this advantage in giving you advice or information or helping you track milestones that are very specific to your child. For example, if you are trying to see, you know, what is it normal for a child to walk or crawl, the CDC will offer a range for kind of an average child. The CDC will say like, between the age of this and this, your child should be expected to walk like very general. Right. If you're going to clawed or wherever, that's the information that they have, right? It's like the range of normal is this to this. We have all

8:08all the information that's been captured every single day that can help you understand what's right for your child and also what's right for your family, right? So is there something Nana could do by looking at my baby in the crib to tell me that like crawling maybe I don't know around the corner or like talking maybe around the corner for her specifically? Definitely. Yeah, that's on the horizon for us. Really? Yeah.

8:34And I think there is a real conviction from the company in that this kind of information will help parents sleep better, have less anxiety, give them this extra resource that is almost a disadvantage to not have. And she even imagines that parents will keep nannits in their kid's bedroom to the age of 10. Wow. But we envision a world where people will have their data from zero to 100. And right now, you know, people aren't really starting kids aren't really starting to wear Apple watches and things like that until around age 10 for the most part, sometimes a little younger. And so we really think of that zero to 10 as Nana's kind of the place that we live. Okay, keeping cameras in a child's bedroom till they're 10 years old. Maybe some kids are totally fine with this, but I can also imagine some kids really not liking that and

9:26not liking being surveilled and maybe that's not healthy for them? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't really happen so much today. So total experiment, I could see a lot of kids really not being okay with this. But on the other hand, you know, the CEO of Nana is saying, we are going to keep this device in my kid's room for longer. Her own kid. Her own kids. And so, so let's see how it goes. Okay. But what about like privacy issues, like irrespective of how the kid feels? Like what is Nana saying that it's doing with all that data that it's collecting by having a camera in the kids room. Yeah. So this is a really big point because obviously parents are really careful about what they put around their children. Understandably. Understandably. And so Nanette says that it does not sell the data to anyone else. It doesn't target ads against it. Not yet. Not yet. They say that they won't. And that the subscription fee that they're charging customers is proof that the customer and the baby, that is not the product. They're charging that money so they can.

10:25offer all of these insights and information to the user. What's that phrase they say in technology that when the product is free, you are the product. And when it costs something like a subscription, then you are not the product. So that sort of makes sense to me and what I understand about selling data. Yeah, that's right. And that's what the company would say here. Subna, after you did this interview with the CEO, obviously as a mother of two children, did that help you weigh the cost benefit analysis just about whether you should have this in your own home?

10:51Yeah, it did help me see some of the benefits and look at, you know, how they're using this information and how it could help me in the future. But, you know, some people in my own life have also pointed out some of the drawbacks and disadvantages of using this sort of technology, namely my own mother, Madhu Mahaswari. So your own mother didn't like this? What were her objections? Many. When you installed the app on my phone, I was shocked, you know? I am just like...

11:22I'm horrified, but I guess I have to accept. I have to take the parents instruction. So the first time my mom watched my daughter overnight, I installed the Nanna app on her phone. It has started sending me messages. Your baby was tanned, you know, that time ago. The baby moved there. You know, I said, my God, this is too much. It was stressing me. Now I'm looking at the monitor and thinking, God had to watch this thing. I don't think I liked it.

11:51I don't know how you guys put up with that. She was shocked by the constant flow of information. She didn't understand why she was getting these push notifications from this app. One day I put it on my phone and my phone battery died. I didn't realize the whole night was on, maybe it was in charge. In the morning, I woke up and I said, oh my God, what perhaps happened to baby? And I woke up and I was like...

12:20And it was such a shift from how she used to put my two siblings in me to sleep. So besides it being jarring and maybe overly stimulating, did your mom have specific objections to the information that she was getting or the instructions that you were giving her about this technology and how to use it?

12:55My mom's of the camp that this kind of information gave us a sense that we could and should control a baby's environment to really optimize the sleep. What does that mean a little bit, optimize the sleep? Yeah.

13:10Nana actually studies the optimal temperature that a baby can sleep at. It's one of the studies they're conducting right now. What is the optimal temperature for a baby? Well, they believe it's between 68 and 72 degrees, but they're finding out for sure. Okay. But it's also kind of lore in the parenting world. I think you would probably find a lot of different sources that tell you that the temperature has to be between 68 and 72 degrees. And to my mom, this is a completely crazy behavior.

13:38Who does sleep with the room temperature? Thus it is shocking. 68 degree. Oh my God. You must be kidding. Baby can sleep in any kind of temperature. Even I have seen India growing up 120 degree, 110 degree. The kids are sleeping. Well, 120 degrees, mom. At least 100 degree, you know. Easy. A baby slept just fine. So I think your mind has been conditioned by these monitors what the temperature should be.

14:06So this is where, you know, this technology is teaching you. There are certain things should be in certain ways. But I don't believe in that. She really believes that babies can sleep in all kinds of environments and that you're bringing a baby into your lifestyle. They will adjust and that is just how parenting is. And my mom thinks this kind of information feeds this unhealthy obsession among modern day working parents. Now, oh my God.

14:36bath routine, seven o'clock or, you know, and then you are on such a schedule and I feel, oh my God, I have to do all these things. Then you have to put them in a sack or you put them in there, you don't want to touch them. Once you drop them in the crib, that's it. It's all tied to these really strict schedules for our kids. And she's of the view that you can't optimize a baby. You can't optimize a little human being.

15:02As much as adults may be trying to optimize every facet of our diets and exercise and this and that, it's a baby. Babies are not robots. You still need to go with the, you know, your instinct, baby's cue, and a bit relaxed about the whole thing. I think she just sees all of this as an unnecessary layer for what is perhaps the most universal of human experiences. Raising a child. Raising a child.

15:28Something you mentioned work and the idea that this technology helps working parents and I do want to point out that I don't know how old your mother is but there are a lot more women in the workforce now than a generation ago and we know that Parenting disproportionately falls to women very often as opposed to men But I do wonder maybe in a little pushback to your mother whether this technology is helping to balance out what is a gender imbalance in parenting by allowing For example, both parents to sleep better at night instead of perhaps just the dad. Right. And I think this is something that came up a lot in my reporting around this story is this technology really appeals to a lot of folks because, you know, they may not have a great maternity or paternity leave and they often have two working parents who have certain schedules. And so, you know, of course there's going to be this desire to

16:22get the child to sleep at a certain time to have a schedule so that you can make that puzzle of life in 2026 in America work for you. And I mean, it's true. My mom didn't work when she had us and she didn't have to adhere to this sort of work schedule while raising three kids. But her bigger concern is, you know, is our generation leaning so much on technology that we're replacing some of our human abilities, some of the things that make us people. And I heard this concern echoed from a pediatrician I spoke with as well. And she said, instead of tuning into what your baby is trying to tell you, observing them yourself, learning their little cues for when they're tired or when they need something from you, are we relying ultimately too much on apps and technology and chatbots? And where does that go from here?

17:18Of course, we've been talking about babies, but this type of data collection, sleep scoring, optimization, these are all things that have been happening with adults for some time now and it's only set to expand. With all of the advances we're now seeing with AI, we are in this new era of being encouraged to rely on this technology for some of the most personal decisions we can make about our health and our bodies. We'll be right back.

18:02Okay, so far we've only been talking about tracking and analyzing data for babies. But obviously a lot of adults like to track their own data, right? Like wearables are a huge market, lots of people listening to this podcast probably use one or know somebody who does. So help me understand how big of a market it is. Like I wonder if you have a way of quantifying it in some way. Well, let me tell you, basically half of Americans have one of these things that are tracking our health in some sort of way. God, half of Americans.

18:31That's right. Do you remember the Fitbit? I do remember the Fitbit. That was the thing that told you to take 10,000 steps a day, right? Like people suddenly bought Fitbits and now everybody was talking about their steps. Yes. So that has given way to a different world where now people are wearing smartwatches, but they're also wearing the Whoop. They're wearing the Aura. They're wearing all of these different devices. And they're way more sophisticated than just counting your steps.

18:56It's interesting. I mean, Aura and Woop are companies that could go public that have been valued in the many billions of dollars, more broadly wearables. And this market is approaching $100 billion, according to some analysts. And more and more people are using them to not just track their activity, but to get this AI-fueled advice on what they should do. Can you just give me an example of that? What are the actual functions on a whoop or an aura ring that are more complicated or sophisticated that people might actually want.

19:27Yeah, so I mean it's it's tracking your sleep and actually funnily enough it gives you a sleep score the same as as an ant it gives you for your baby I can give you really detailed feedback on your exercise habits and Woop in particular offers something called a recovery score for its users every morning and it comes in three different colors red yellow and green and they say it's based on a bunch of metrics stress if you're feeling sick, how poorly you ate or how well you ate, how hard you worked out. And then they shoot out this number that's supposed to tell you how ready your body is to take on the day. And just to be clear, these are consumer products, not medical devices. So this is a sort of label that who came up with, but its users love it. Okay, but like, how does this actually help you? Because I can imagine that the advice this thing is giving you is probably advice.

20:23you kind of knew already? Like, what is it doing that common sense and the internet weren't already doing? Rachel, this is the Luddite's perspective. Okay, so I mean, to be fair, I don't own one of these devices. I wear an Apple watch. I use it more for the timer. I use it kind of to keep a loose eye on whether I exercise or moved or if I'm traveling. Oh, wow. Like, look how many steps I made. But my husband recently started wearing a whoop.

20:52And so I've gotten kind of a closer look at these devices and how they can alter a person's habits. And I got to say, you know, doctors have been telling him to do this or that for years, but now that whoop tells him. He actually listens? Yes, he does. Oh my God. Wait, so what's that dynamic? Why is he listening to whoop? What is it telling him?

21:11So I wanted to talk to my husband for this episode, but he refused. So I did the next best thing, and I decided to interview the friend who got him into the whoop. You are kind of whoop patient zero in our household. That is flattering, I guess you could say. OK, tell us about the friend. So our friend Kevin Huang is a trader for a hedge fund, and so probably more than most people, he's obsessed with data. It felt like something that would jive with my own personality, kind of gamifying your health in a way. Last fall he got a whoop after a bunch of his friends were talking up all of these metrics that the whoop collects. It feels like whenever you talk to someone who also has a whoop, that's the single commonality of, oh well, how old are you?

22:01How old does your whoop think you are? And one of the things that got him hooked right away on this thing was something called the whoop age. Okay, what is a whoop age? So it's this number that is such a good marketing gimmick for this device. And it's based on a bunch of things. It's based on your sleep performance.

22:19performance is such an absurd word to use, but it is a common word now for this. It's based on your resting heart rate, the amount of activity you engage in every day. And Kevin, who is 37 at the time, did not score so hot. What did he score? How old was his whoop age? My first whoop age was actually 44, which was a bit of a shocking number.

22:42He said he was 44. Oh no, that's so much older. I don't think it's fair to put someone in a whole different decade without their permission. No, how did he respond? It was a wake-up call for him and he made some pretty big lifestyle changes as a result. Like what? I started waking up regularly at about 5 a.m. on work days to go to the gym to do 45 minutes of cardio every day. He started waking up an hour earlier than usual to exercise before work. Kind of seeing on a...

23:11day-to-day basis, what your recovery is, what your sleep score is. It's kind of like a daily report card of your health and well-being and, you know, very motivating in that way. He was really focused on his sleep and recovery and he's watching his diet. So if I eat clean and healthy, then, you know, the recovery score usually is a lot better. Whereas if I'm eating, you know, a lot of fried food and a lot of high sodium food, the recovery score will be lower.

23:38And what is his whoophage? Well, about a year later, his whoophage is now 35. Congratulations, Kevin. You're back in your 30s. So, okay, so if he went from a 44-year-old whoophage to 35, that's pretty impressive if we are to believe that the whoophage actually means something. Right, which is a significant caveat here.

23:58But, you know, he does feel healthier and he's doing this in part for his kids to be a more active dad and to hopefully live longer eventually too because of these significant lifestyle changes he made. That is so interesting because I'm going to bet that like your husband, he probably knew that those changes would be good for his health before he had a whoop and a whoop age. And yet it took the whoop and the whoop age to actually influence his behavior. Yeah, that's right. And I think that's similar to some of what the NANET CEO was pushing around the company and the sort of specificity of the data that they offer and the recommendations tailored to your child. The whoop was tracking him specifically. I think that the advice then that he got from this app and from this product felt really meaningful because it was tailored to his activities and all the information he'd been sort of feeding the device over a couple of weeks.

24:56And I think that's the difference in why this advice might feel more powerful. That actually makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that like, just as an example, people pay personal trainers, right? And it's not necessarily because they don't know what the exercises are or that they need somebody to like make sure their posture is correct. They don't hurt themselves. A lot of times it's just if you pay somebody, you will actually show up to the gym. So it sort of sounds like there's something about getting tailored specific information that makes you think like, oh, I really gotta do something. As opposed to just hearing like, people should eat more fruits and vegetables. Yeah, I think that's right. And it was seeing Kevin change his habits and talk about the whoop and his whoop age that convinced my husband to join the sort of the cult around this product. You're kind of answering my question here. How do you feel about...

25:41him joining the cult, like does he talk about it incessantly in his own whoop age now? Well, I think the weirdest thing is that whoop has really entered the chat of our relationship. If we are going out with friends, let's say we have a great evening, maybe we've had a couple cocktails, you know, the next day he's sort of lamenting, oh man, like drinking is never a good idea. Look at my numbers. Kind of similarly, if you have a decadent meal or if...

26:07sleep didn't go great one night. I'm then left looking at his whoop recovery score. He's opening the app and showing me and it kind of gives me anxiety. I'm like, oh my God, his score is not very good.

26:20You know, you're worrying about his whoops score. It sounds like such a bummer. It sounds like such a buzzkill. I mean, well, it adds this, like, layer of reality to, okay, oh my gosh, like, we didn't sleep great. We didn't eat great. We had a little too much fun last night, and here are the numbers to show for it. But on the flip side, when you get a great night of sleep or you eat very well or you've had some great habits, the whoops positive feedback feels like...

26:48a reward, a blessing, if you will. And I think that's what they're going for. It sounds like whoop is basically just wagging its finger at you. Yeah, but with the really tailored matrix and data. Oh, great. How fun. You know, I can't help but notice though, subna that these two stories that you told me today, even though they involve people who really love their data, whether it's like you and the nanit and your kid or your husband, It also feels like there's some kind of trade-off because like somebody in these stories is getting kind of annoyed by this, whether it's your mother or maybe even you. Is that how you see it? I mean, I think there is this tension right now between people who sort of subscribe to this data making their lives better and being worth collecting and being the way of the future and those who say, you know, what's the point? Like, do we need any of this?

27:45should we break our phones and unplug and do this less. And I think it's a tension that exists in our society writ large. And I'm really curious to see if these companies who are trafficking in this world are right and that this is the way of the future and that this conversation will seem trite when we all have libraries of data from zero to a hundred. And it feels too, like this is coming at a time when we're just learning about how AI can be used to interpret all of this information. We know that AI thrives on data, and here we are collecting reams and reams of data around how we breathe in the case of a baby, but also walk, move, eat, sleep.

28:35what kinds of information, recommendations will we get from all of that? How could this affect us as we age? I mean, right now, one thing that really struck me as I was researching this, I talked to a researcher who had been studying people using wearables and all of these smartwatches and aura rings and whoops. And she was saying that...

28:56what they have found largely is the people optimizing their wellness are those that are already well. Which made me laugh because it did make me think about a lot of the people in my own life who are using this technology. But on the other hand, there are some pretty amazing breakthroughs that some of these wearables have come to around identifying early onset Parkinson's or different things related to the heart. And so as people live longer, have more of this information. Who knows? Maybe some of this data could be much more meaningful than just a sleep score or how you should exercise one day or another. I want to come back to something that you said earlier that I have just been thinking about this entire conversation that I think is so interesting, which is this idea that all of this, even given all of these benefits,

29:47that we are losing some part of our intuition and our ability to listen to our instincts. Because we are living in an age right now where one of the dominant stories is AI in some ways taking away from our humanity. And I just wonder how you as a person who is covering this and living this and using this, how are you weighing all of those benefits that you just mentioned and all of those unknown benefits potentially against what your mom is concerned about? That this is just making us less of what makes us people? Yeah. I think that's the big question here. And I feel a lot of concern around that. I mean, is technology dulling our instincts and our senses really? And that's why I was so interested in this subject around babies and baby monitors, because to me, becoming a parent felt universal. Like I was engaging in something ancient.

30:44something humans have been doing literally since the beginning of humans. And here I was being presented with all of these new tools in which to do this thing that people have been doing forever. And what did that mean for me, for people like me, for generations around us?

31:05I think all of this technology raises the question, are we giving up something meaningful, something superhuman, something very us, when we engage with it, when we turn to it, when we outsource decisions to it? And I see with the growth of these technologies, with the ambitions of these companies, these are questions that we will all be grappling with increasingly in the future.

31:44You can read more from Sapna Mahashwari and all of our business reporters on the New York Times app. If you don't already have the app, we wanted to let you know that if you download it right now, you'll get access to all of our journalism free for one month. So give it a try. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. President Trump told the UN General Assembly in New York that he had a decision to make on Iran to strike a deal with Tehran or quote, annihilate the Islamic Republic.

32:27Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?" His threat amid a defense of the war he launched alongside Israel in February came as allies have begun to openly question whether the United States remains a credible partner. And...

32:47The Trump administration has ejected more than 750,000 people from the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces. Vice President JD Vance announced on Tuesday, claiming that many were receiving premium subsidies they did not qualify for and that some people were not even real. We're actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them. Amazingly, we weren't doing that before. Now, the move is Vance's latest attempt to rein in what he sees as fraud in the federal health care system.

33:22Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen and Alec Stern, with help from Ricky Nevetsky and edited by Lisa Chow. It contains music by Marian Lazano, Rowan Nemisto and Dan Powell, and it was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.