Smart Cradle: An Automated Soothing Baby Cradle Integrated with Mobile App for Remote Control and Assistive Features

Babies need quick attention and comfort when they cry. It is a struggle for caregivers to quickly respond in situations where they have multiple tasks to handle or during nighttime hours. Putting the baby into the cradle is the common way used to comfort the baby and help them fall asleep. Reviewing related studies, there are existing systems that offer automation in soothing and remote control of the cradle. We identified two major issues: relying on sound-level thresholds to detect infant cries and unreliable internet-based control. To bridge this gap, we design a system that automatically detects baby cry using a cry detection model to achieve high accuracy in the presence of background noise and local connectivity, to allow for remote control of the cradle. The system uses embedded systems for the smart cradle. It performs automatic soothing and integrates Android mobile application development for local cradle control. Even with background noise, the guided testing results reliably detected infant cries. The system started both swinging and lullaby playback. Manual control through the app also needs to be improved, especially in syncing the user interface and hardware. Testing in real-world situations and further refinement of the model, hardware, and software integration are recommended for system usability and reliability.