Review: Nanit Sleep System

Data is the lifeline by which many new parents drag themselves through the fog of early infancy. Some new parents are more low-key than others. They roll their eyes good-naturedly with every wakeup, and their baby books are filled with pictures and meaningful events, like first words.

But I’m not like that. Instead, I maniacally document each minute occurrence on my phone, scanning for patterns that would allow me to predict when our infant would let us finally get a few hours’ rest. I realized we might be tipping into Crazy Town when I asked our nanny to start noting my infant’s naps and bottles in his Baby Tracker online log. She took a look and said, “You wrote all this down...in the middle of the night?”

The Nanit baby monitor saves new parents from endless documentation hell. It automatically notes when your baby is asleep or awake, how often you check in, and how long it takes them to fall asleep. The monitor also warns you when the room’s temperature or humidity are venturing out of the preset comfort parameters, and a subscription service called Nanit Insights gives you tips about how to help your baby sleep better.

It’s the baby data collector that sleep-deprived geek parents long for. As a friend told me when she checked out my infant’s activity history on the Nanit app: “I would’ve killed for this when my son was little.”

Of course, the elephant in the room is that the Nanit monitor is Wi-Fi-enabled. Many parents won’t ever be comfortable with a monitor that transfers images and video of their most precious one into the cloud, and it’s a valid concern.

Nanit takes precautions that other, cheaper cameras do not. For example, it doesn’t have two-way audio, so hackers can’t shout at your children in the middle of the night. The monitor has 256-bit encryption for data encryption, and it’s HIPAA-compliant, which means that it meets federal standards for having physical, network, and process security measures in place to protect sensitive health information.

There are other ways you can keep it more secure, like changing your network password, unplugging it regularly, and making sure the firmware is up to date. But ultimately, it’s up to you to decide whether or not you feel safe.

That said, the Nanit monitor itself is a small, attractive, unobtrusive piece of hardware. If you've ever hung a picture frame straight, you'll find it easy to mark the center point of your crib and drill holes in the wall to put up the wall mount. The monitor comes with a cord management system to keep your little one from getting tangled in it. You can also purchase the sleep system with a tip-proof floor stand for an additional $50 if you don’t want to drill into your wall, or a multi-stand for use while traveling (although it won’t be able to collect sleep data if it’s not mounted above the crib).

Once it’s installed, you connect it to Wi-Fi and sync the monitor to the Nanit app on your phone. You can also take pictures and turn on the camera's gently glowing night light remotely.

The picture quality is excellent, compared to other Wi-Fi monitors that I’ve tried. It has a 1280x960 resolution camera with a wide angle lens, which Nanit informs me provides the optimal aspect ratio for viewing a crib. 10 infrared LEDs give you clear night vision. You can open an expanded version of the camera view and zoom in with your fingers.

The Nanit monitor is a good example of what baby-specific engineering might look like. For example, it communicates directly with your router so that it can continue to livestream even if your internet connection bites the dust. You can also stream audio even if the app is closed, which you can’t do with a security camera like the Nest Cam.

It is possible to use the Nanit camera without subscribing to Nanit Insights, which is an eye-watering $100/year for a 30-day stored history and $300/year for unlimited storage history. The monitor will still show clear live footage and send you push notifications, but you would be cheating yourself if you didn't consider subscribing just for the sleep tracking features. Nanit’s sophisticated sleep tracking system is breathtaking, and you can try it out for free for 30 days. Like the Nest, Nanit uses computer vision and machine learning algorithms to identify what’s going on in your kid’s crib.

If you’re not comfortable with a Wi-Fi camera, you probably won’t be comfortable with Nanit’s Insights program. It accumulates data, anonymizes it, and uses it to help improve the identification software for everyone. There’s no way to opt out, although they are currently in the process of implementing GDPR requirements in order to let users remove their data from the system.

But if you’re comfortable with Nanit’s security practices, the machine learning is incredible. Every parent has put down a drowsy infant, tiptoed out of the room, then squinted at the monitor to try and figure out if they've fallen asleep. The Nanit nails it. Every time I check the short video clip, there it is—the eyes closing, the body slowly slackening. It's so subtle, and yet so difficult for even grown human beings to interpret.

You'll probably have to adjust the Nanit’s notification settings to your liking. Until we did, I was getting anywhere between 50-70 push notifications every few hours. For example, you can designate a motion area around the crib to distinguish between the baby’s movements and a toddler’s in the same room. You can also dial back the sensitivity of audio alerts. Until I did so, the Nanit informed me that it heard crying in the nursery when my toddler shrieked elsewhere in the house.

The temperature sensor was also very sensitive. The temperature in our nursery is monitored by an independent sensor, and we have both an air-conditioner and heater. A few times, the Nanit informed me that the temperature was exceeding or falling to barely habitable levels, but when I rushed into the nursery, the air temperature was comfortable. It’s likely that the occasional warnings that the temperature had left the comfort parameters might be because the Nanit is mounted on an exterior wall.

The app is easy to navigate and use. You can view daily sleep habits on a dashboard or look at night trends in graphical or numeric form. Sad or happy expressions on a baby face summarize whether or not your infant had a good night, and the Nanit saves short video clips of your infant’s nightly activities (arguing cases in court, building highway overpasses, etc).

The most significant feature is the Sleep Coach. Nanit Insights crunches all this data in a proprietary algorithm, which they derived in consultation with pioneers in the field of pediatric sleep medicine, such as Dr. Avi Sadeh. It took over two weeks for our first Insight to appear in our mailbox.

At ten months old, my son is still waking up between one to three times a night. I am really, really tired, so it’s difficult to explain the degree of excitement with which I awaited our first insight. Finally, it appeared. “It looks like you took [your infant] out of the crib a lot this week,” Nanit mused in my inbox.

They’ve gotten more helpful as the weeks have worn on. Nanit suggested waiting two to five minutes before picking him up to see if he soothes himself back to sleep; I timed myself, but I’ve been waiting less than that to pick him up. Nanit informs me that other tips include how to get your child to sleep in later. I await that advice eagerly, but in the meantime I'm burning sage around his crib and I have an exorcist on speed dial. Whatever helps!

The Nanit system is not cheap. At $279, it's almost a hundred dollars more than the Nest Cam, which is itself a top-of-the-line, premium camera. And that’s before you subscribe to a year’s worth of Nanit Insights, which brings the total price up to a whopping $379.

This seems like a ridiculous, utterly unreasonable price to pay for a baby monitor, especially when you can pick up a basic, audio-only monitor for $30. However, it’s hard to comprehend the depths of desperation to which you can sink when you haven’t had four hours of sleep in a row for months. Every single new parent forum is full of people buying all sorts of junk to help their kids sleep better—whether it’s expensive swings, specialized swaddles, or noise machines.

The Nanit looks great and is easy to install. The logs make it a cinch to check back on the night’s events, instead of relying on my faulty journaling—was his last bottle at 2 a.m. or 5 a.m.? And the tips aren’t junk science. Even if they’re occasionally unhelpful, they tally with the recommendations in my childcare manuals.

If you’re a new parent who is trying to figure out a good way to get your kid to sleep better, and who also doesn’t already own a baby monitor, the Nanit is a great way to start. Even if this week’s email informed me that my infant is already well within the optimal range of nighttime visits and sleep efficiency for his age group. You mean, this is as good as it gets? Turns out that not even the most expensive monitor can prevent parenthood from being exhausting.