Design and implementation of an automated baby monitoring cradle

Abstract Ever increasing global birth rate, increased working women ratio and innovative technologies motivate the engineering society to introduce novel ideas for the baby caring. Considering this, we present hardware implementation of an automatic cradle for smart and remote monitoring. In contrast to previous implementations, we present the design insights such as swing angle, required force and torque, arc length and speed of the cradle for the first time in the literature. Furthermore, to make the cradle more comfortable and smooth swing, we introduce a novel Slider Crank Mechanism to control the cradle swing for the first time in the literature. This provides flexibility, and improved energy efficiency, while maintaining controlled and predictable reciprocating motion. The proposed solution is equipped with a number of technological features, that is, cry detection based swing, collision avoidance, WiFi based remote video monitoring, wet detection and baby health monitoring system.