Products:
Owlet Smart Green Sock Baby Monitor – $299
Owlet Smart Sock + Cam – $399
Owlet Smart Blue Sock Baby Monitor – $299.99
Owlet walks on a very different path as compared to other Wifi video baby monitors. They started out as a baby health monitor with their Owlet Sock, which monitors your baby’s oxygen level and heartbeat.
Your baby wears a comfortable sock which alerts parents immediately if their baby’s oxygen level and heartbeat fall out of safety range. Owlet Sock uses pulse oximetry, a tried and tested non-invasive technology that accurately measures your baby’s heartbeat and oxygen saturation.
After listening to customer’s feedback, they had made multiple changes by upgrading the Sock and incorporated a camera over time, making them a complete baby monitor solution. There are things that they missed and we hope that it will be fixed in future versions but Owlet Sock remains their most important feature for parents.
Picture/Audio Quality
Owlet has an excellent camera with clear images and good audio, much like the other high tier and recent baby monitors out in the market. Their night vision is showing up fine at night. You can’t remotely pan and tilt the camera image and so you have to set it up correctly with an overhead view. Try wall mounting the camera for the best effects.
Owlet Sock’s Comfort and Touch
Owlet Sock is a really nifty piece of technology packed into soft comfortable sock material that fits in nicely onto your baby’s foot. The sock’s material is breathable, and it feels as if it isn’t there which does not bother your baby especially at night. There are 3 washable socks in the box.
It fits infants up to 18-month-old. The sock is made of cotton and can fit either of your baby’s foot. It is advisable to rotate between the left and right foot every night. Do wash the sock gently with cold water and then leave it to air dry.
Using Bluetooth and Owlet’s Battery Life
There is a Bluetooth transmitter embedded into the sock, which transmits vital signs back to a base station that is placed within 100 feet of the sock. With our testing, we find that the actual signal strength is more likely to be around 60 feet with walls in between signals.
Depending on your requirements, you might need to use your wifi connection if you want to get notifications when you are further away in your house. There is a green light on the base station to show that things are okay and it turns to red with alarm ringing if something is wrong with your baby’s heartbeat and oxygen levels.
Bluetooth is probably the safest option for your child if you are worried about the emitted EMF from devices. Bluetooth connection emits about 1% compared to smartphones, wifi fields and the other 2.4GHz FHSS connection that many wifi baby monitors use.
Owlet Sock has an excellent battery life that lasts through 2 nights and requires only 3 hours to charge fully.
App’s Functionality
This is the area that Owlet is lacking. Owlet does the basic job of allowing you to view the video feed from your phone and to receive notifications from Owlet Sock. As compared to baby monitors like Nanit Plus (which cost $100 lesser than Owlet), they do not provide sleep analytics or personalized recommendations in the app.
Similar to other Wifi baby monitors, if you do need to get immediate notification from Owlet through the night, you will need to keep a phone/tablet that is always on. If you are considering between radio and wifi baby monitor, this might be one of the concerns of Owlet as well as all other Wifi baby monitors.
The Verdict
Owlet Sock was built for a specific health purpose: to track oxygen levels and heartbeat, which is more concerning for infants that are in their first few months. Once babies get past that, it will be easier to look out for SDS through the video camera, in which Owlet’s system is lacking in.
For parents who don’t have reasons to be worried about your baby’s heartbeat and oxygen level at night, there are simply other better Wifi video baby monitors like Nanit Plus and Infant Optics DX-8 that has better camera features and gives you a better return on investment when using it long term.