This Smart Bracelet Lets Your Partner Feel the Baby Kicking in Real Time
(Fibo)
Being pregnant is weird and difficult and uncomfortable, but it’s also exciting, and a unique experience unlike anything else. It makes sense that a non-gestational parent would want to feel a little more involved, so some innovative jewelry designers from Denmark have created a new bracelet that lets non-pregnant parents know when their future baby is kicking.
The bracelet is called Fibo, for First Bond, and it looks a lot like a FitBit with some beads inside of it. The pregnant parent wears a monitor that tracks when the fetus is kicking, and when that happens the Fibo bracelet rolls the beads around like a tiny little wrist massage that “mimics the baby’s movements by rotating and pressing on the wrist of the person wearing it.”
That might seem odd at first, but this device would be useful for a whole lot of people. It’s not just for fathers, either. Same-sex partners, parents using a surrogate, and a future baby’s adoptive parents are just some of the people who might want to wear a bracelet like that.
OK, it would be a particularly generous pregnant woman who would agree to wear an extra monitor while she was already running around being very pregnant. But there are many generous pregnant people out there who would be willing to do that. Especially since one of the bracelet’s cooler functions is that it saves up all the fetal movement information and can re-play it whenever the wearer wants. You could be wearing the “feel the baby kicking” bracelet during the kid’s high school graduation. Don’t tell me you don’t want to cry just thinking about it.
Sure, a little bead massage does not quite translate the actual experience of being kicked by a fetus. It does not mimic the physical sensation of feeling an actual foot kicking the *inside* of one’s rib cage. But it gives a non-gestational parent a way to feel connected to the event even when not physically present, and that’s pretty sweet.
The Fibo bracelet is not yet in production, but prototypes are being tested and the designers hope to have a functional pregnancy smart bracelet on the market soon.
