Almost seven years ago, my partner and I took an ill-advised road trip to a wedding with our almost month-old child. In those early days our child cried. A lot. Loud. In the confines of an SUV, this meant a nightmare of constantly stopping, desperately and often futilely trying to quell the suffering of this tiny fleshy sack full of our combined genetics, which has no understanding of our world.
This is supposedly where things like the “smart doll” Iruyo come into play, a two-piece, fluffy animatronic toy with the supposed ability to detect when a child is sleeping. Iruyo was designed by Nissan in collaboration with an advertising agency and a retail chain (so we’re already off to a good start) as part of a marketing campaign to promote Nissan’s driver assistance features Wired. Iruyo reportedly uses technology similar to the automaker’s radar and camera detection capabilities to monitor your child’s eyes and tell you when they’re sleeping. Get a lot of it in this ad:
So there’s the big Iruyo – a muppet-like robot who can use his hands and arms to create emotions and sing songs for your child. When it detects that your child is sleeping, it passes this information back to a smaller Iruyo, who sits up front next to you and appears to close its eyes when your child goes to sleep, letting you know that it is resting. You know, something like a mirror, but more expensive and less informative.
Wired writes that a series of “specific voice commands” can cause Iruyo to play peek-a-boo or clap. It seems designed to solve the dual problem of a crying baby and the parent’s strong need to have a content child to watch, but who they can’t watch because their car seat is facing away from them.
There are a few problems here. For one thing, a furry avatar that can close its eyes when my kid does won’t solve any problem at all. I need to be able to see my child’s face for more reasons than just knowing if he’s asleep or awake – somehow I very much doubt Iruyo is capable of letting me know that my child has vomited everywhere or Tried to swallow the hardened remnants of a french fry that I missed the last time I cleaned the car seat.
The other thing is, seriously, have you ever tried to calm a baby who is in complete panic? A robot that claps or whatever, Perhaps, sometimes stop them from getting there, but usually they don’t scream because they’re bored. They scream because they pooped and their bottom is covered in diaper rash that you swore wasn’t there this morning, or because they’re hungry, or because their stomach hurts, or because their diaper is bunched up in a weird way, and that’s to pinch them, or a million other possible reasons.
And when they’re at that point – where their eyes are closed and they’re wailing in uncomprehending, helpless misery – the tinny song from the speaker of a shitty, flailing robot toy is no more going to calm them down than soothing jazz music. The best and only way out is to put on Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” and pray that you’ll soon find a place to turn it off so you can change a diaper in the trunk, all the while enduring the knowing sympathy of passing parents as well the indignant anger of the parents, the childless ones, while you curse the day you even decided to take this trip.
But as skeptical as I am about this matter, I also recognize that no two children are the same and neither are their parents. Maybe Iruyo could work for some people – and besides, it never hurts to have options, right?
It’s not clear whether Nissan is truly responding to the needs of parents or whether it’s just cynically appealing to the feelings that arise in the darkest, most sleepless moments of parenthood. Big companies are constantly proposing new technologies to meet the needs of parents, but they don’t always get to the point – check out Owlet’s baby vital monitoring socks, which had to be redesigned after a nearly two-year FDA ban, or the FDA-approved smart baby crib for $1,700 That apparently doesn’t work any better than a regular one. Of course, there isn’t nearly as much at stake with Iruyo. Just your dollars.