Kickbee: Baby’s First Twitter

It seems it’s never too early to get your kids started on sharing their thoughts and emotions. Designer and expectant father Corey Menscher has created the Kickbee, a device worn by pregnant mothers that senses a baby’s movements inside the womb and transmits them onto digital networks.  Realizing that fathers don’t have the same intimate physical connection to their unborn children, Menscher wanted a means of experiencing greater awareness and believes that this technology can do just that.

The Java application receives the sensor values and analyzes them. When a kick event is detected, a Twitter message is posted via the Twitter API. I chose to use Twitter because it is easy to initiate an SMS message to any mobile phone when a kick is detected. It also acts as a data log that can be accessed programmatically for visualization or archiving.

As he further develops the Kickbee, Menscher hopes to bring a bit more personality to the individual posts. For those interested in following the early musings of his well-connected progeny, you can do so here.

[via Ubergizmo]