Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Counting baby's movements

I thought I'd got to the stage where I'd seen it all, but this is the latest machine that you can buy from America - an electronic monitor that counts baby movements. You can also use it to count contractions.

I suppose pregnant women cannot count for themselves or use a pen and water to write it down?

Mind you, I don't suppose it is as bad as Tom Cruise having his own private ultrasound scan at home.

Suffice to say, it was designed by an obstetrician!

Thanks to The Baby Bump Project that alerted me to this.

5 comments:

Carolyn said...

One of our local design students students was looking at designing something like this for women a couple of years ago. I actually thought it was quite good that someone was looking at technology which supported "normal".
This might just satisfy the cravings of the gadget geeks. It is still the womans perceptions of fetal movements. So although I can see it seems over the top I can also see some positives in this.

Carolyn said...

One more wee thing. If obstetricians valued the 'evidence' given by this gadget as much as the CTG monitor it might actually be a good thing.

Sarah Stewart said...

...do you think so? I don't. I see it as just another way of making money out of families and hooking them in to the whole 'surveillance' anxiety, although I also appreciate you could use that argument about kick charts.

Anonymous said...

for me it seems as useless as a pedometer...
but then, i never heard about kick charts until 2 days ago.

Sarah Stewart said...

I think kick charts are very useful for women who find it difficult to feel their baby's movements and also women whose pregnancy have risk factors eg baby is small or are heavy smokers or the women had previous histories of problems. But as a routine thing, I think it is far more useful to support women to really zone in on their babies and be intuitive about their baby's health.