The Baby Monitor CEO Who Wants to Record Childhood to Age 10
Anushka Salinas calls the first five years a black box and says daily data can beat generic advice, building toward a life record from zero to 100.
The Daily · Health Trackers Are Everywhere. Do Babies Need Them, Too?When Sapna Maheshwari, a reporter who uses a Nanit baby monitor at home, went to the company's New York office to interview chief executive Anushka Salinas, she wanted to know what the company planned to do with all its crib video. Salinas answered with a claim about early childhood.
Salinas told Maheshwari, "So 90% of a child's brain develops, you know, between the ages of zero and five," when the brain is most changeable. Yet, she said, kids are going to the pediatrician "basically once a year for a checkup" that lasts 22 minutes on average, even as they change every day. She called that gap, in her words, "this black box that's the first five years of life."
Nanit's answer, she argued, is daily measurement. The device focuses on sleep now, but Salinas wants to expand into overall health and development, and she argued that constant, personalized records can answer the daily "Is this normal" questions better than searching Google, Reddit, or ChatGPT. Where public health guidelines give a wide range for when an average child walks, she said Nanit holds information captured every day that can help a parent understand what is right for that child, and for that family. Predicting whether crawling or talking is around the corner for a particular baby, she said, is on the horizon.
That logic leads to her longer bet. Salinas said she imagines parents keeping the bedroom camera until age 10, covering the years before children start wearing watches like an Apple Watch, usually around age 10. She described that stretch as Nanit's place to live, in her words, "we envision a world where people will have their data from zero to 100." Not every child may welcome a camera in the bedroom for that long.
Questions people ask
Does Nanit sell the data it collects on babies?
Nanit says it does not sell customer data or use it to target ads. The company points to its business model, which charges for the camera hardware plus an optional subscription for features and insights, rather than giving the product away for free.
Can a monitor really predict when a specific baby will crawl or talk?
Not precisely for an individual child. Pediatricians use wide age ranges because healthy babies vary a lot in when they crawl, walk, and talk. Daily video and movement logs might narrow the picture, but doctors still treat them as background information, not a diagnosis.
What do older kids think about having a camera in the bedroom?
There is little published research on bedroom cameras kept into middle childhood. Privacy specialists generally say older children begin to expect more bodily privacy and control over images of themselves. That expectation is one reason family rules usually change as children grow.