The Evoz story: Evoz CEO Ruwan Welaratna talks to Kim West LCSW-C, The Sleep Lady®

Tue, 25 Apr 17

On April 12, Evoz CEO Ruwan Welaratna talked live on Facebook with Kim West LCSW-C, The Sleep Lady®. Kim is a sleep expert and author of The Sleep Lady’s Good Night, Sleep Tight: Gentle Proven Solutions to Help Your Child Sleep Well and Wake Up Happy. Kim and Ruwan talked about baby monitors, safety and security concerns, and the features of our Evoz Smart Baby Monitor: in short, the whole Evoz story. If you’re doing your homework and looking for the right monitor, we highly recommend taking a look!

Or, if you don’t have half an hour to watch the whole video, here’s our executive summary:

Once upon a time…

Baby monitors started getting popular in the 70’s. Back then they were like little walkie talkies – with all the fun, but also frustration, that implies! As time went on, technology improved. In the 90’s and 00’s, baby monitors started using the same technology as cordless phones, called DECT. But DECT monitors still had range problems—you might be just on the other side of your house, and the monitor would suddenly buzz with interference from some entirely different radio signal, or cut out entirely.

The Evoz story begins

The idea that launched Evoz started with exactly this problem. A good friend of ours had moved into student housing with his wife and their baby. The baby’s room was upstairs at the back of a duplex. One night, there was a barbecue for all the grad students in the common area right in front of the house. The baby was down for the night, so theoretically both parents could enjoy socializing. But their monitor wouldn’t reach down to the common area! My friend ended up taking his wife’s cell phone, calling his cell phone, and leaving his wife’s cell phone next to the baby. He walked around the barbecue all evening with the phones connected, listening for the baby to wake up and thinking: there has to be a better way!

WiFi to the rescue

So we were one of the first companies to produce a WiFi monitor. There are several big advantages to WiFi. First, no special receiver is required – the monitor sits in the baby’s room and communicates with the WiFi base station in your house. From there, the information can be transmitted over the internet, and you can use either a WiFi or cellular data connection on your phone to receive it. So you can monitor the baby using your phone (or your partner’s phone, or the babysitter’s phone, or all of those at the same time!). This is better both in terms of getting a reliable signal and in terms of the electromagnetic radiation needed – the monitor doesn’t need to have the radio strength to reach outside, just as far as the base station. 

Questions about wearables

More recently, some companies have developed so-called “wearable” monitors. These monitor the baby’s vital signs (breathing or pulse, for example) instead of using a camera or microphone. We’re not ready to go there yet – putting a radio transmitter right next to baby’s skin seems to us an unnecessary risk. And we think that a video monitor actually gives more information about what is going on in baby’s room.

We are following the lead of the American Academy of Pediatrics and their recommendations on SIDS and safe baby sleep. As of October 2016, The AAP recommends against using “home monitors and commercial devices … marketed to reduce the risk of SIDS.”

What about security?

Of course people’s main concern with WiFi monitors is security. If the information travels over the internet, can’t someone hack into it? The fact is, it is easy to hack some WiFi monitors, because some companies don’t pay enough attention to security. For example, some companies ship monitors with a default password. Any hacker can go online, find this password, and connect to the monitor of anyone who forgot to change it. At Evoz, we’ve been thinking about security right from the start. We don’t ship monitors with a preset username and password, or use the notoriously hackable UPnP protocol, or leave a Telnet server running on our devices… And we’re constantly on the lookout for other potential vulnerabilities. The protocols that connect the monitor to our servers, and our servers to your iOS and Android devices, use the same underlying technology as on secure banking websites.

What else sets Evoz apart?

What sets Evoz apart even more is the thoughtful set of additional features we provide:

• Automatic cry detection, which gives you extra peace of mind that you’ll know when baby wakes up
• Baby data logging, so you can keep track of baby’s schedule and get help from an expert when you need it
• Access control for guests and caregivers
• And of course helpful content from Kim West!

In the newest version of our app, released just this week, we’ve added even more support for families of multiples.

…and that’s the Evoz story! We’re happy to answer any other questions you have – contact us any time at support@myevoz.com. If you’re ready to buy a monitor, check out the Evoz Smart Baby Monitor on our online store or on Amazon.

*this post was updated on May 8, 2017 to reflect the APP’s current recommendations on SIDS and safe baby sleep.

Disclosure: This blog post contains contextual affiliate links. Evo Inc. may get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.