SINGAPORE — Popular diaper brand Pampers just jumped on the babytech bandwagon with its new Lumi system — a sensor attached to diapers that sends an app notification when the  baby’s diaper is wet.

For now, however, the sensor can track only urine and not faeces in the diaper.

The high-tech diaper sensor — using what Pampers calls the “connected care system”— can also send information on the baby’s sleep patterns to the app. Parents who want to track their child’s feeding times or dirty diaper changes can do so but they will have to manually input this info.

This high-tech diaper was announced by Pampers on Thursday (July 18) and is expected to launch in the US later this year. Pricing for the smart diaper has not been revealed. 

The Lumi system comes with a video monitor — developed together with Logitech — which is integrated with the app and is able to show wide-angle views of the nursery. According to tech blog Engadget, the monitor can also measure the temperature and humidity.

Pampers did not say how much the system will cost, but according to some early reviews, “it’s a lot of work for a small decrease in effort”, said one report by Fast Company. It noted that besides having to buy special Lumi diapers from Pampers, the sensors will also need to be replaced every three months.

Pampers’ Lumi isn’t the first high-tech diaper though. According to a Washington Post report, Google’s parent company Alphabet filed a patent for “a diaper sensor for detecting and differentiating faeces and urine” in 2016, and last year, Huggies partnered with Korean company Monit to launch a smart diaper sensor in Korea and Japan. AGENCIES