This smart baby monitor goes a little further than your standard monitor. It combines a “Dream Sock” smart sock wearable that you attach to your baby's foot and a Cam 2 monitor that you place in the nursery. You can then keep an eye on your baby as it streams 1080p HD video over Wi-Fi to the very comprehensive Owlet App on your smartphone. With the sock wearable in place, you can track your baby’s heart rate and average oxygen level. We found this effective enough, though of course it won’t be as accurate as a hospital-grade tracker.
The app comes with lots of useful extra info, and it can monitor the nursery room temperature, humidity, and noise level. We like that it comes packed with lots of useful sleep data—possibly more than you’ll ever need, but it’s a bonus. As well as watching and saving videoclips of your baby, you can analyze your baby’s sleep patterns using the data from the app. The Predictive Sleep Technology, for example, will try to identify your baby’s sleep patterns to get to know when their next nap or sleep time is. (It’s a great idea in theory, but good luck with that.)
The Owlet monitor itself sends real-time motion and sound alerts direct to your smartphone when your baby moves or makes a noise. It has a 4X zoom, wide-angle view, and night vision, and it also gives you the option for two-way talk when you want to soothe your baby with your voice through the camera. The entry-level wearable sock is designed to suit babies up to 18 months old, but you can opt for a larger design that works up to 5 years. (We suspect, though, that it will work best when the baby is younger, as they’re less likely to pull it off.) We do wish the kit included a separate parent unit so you weren't entirely reliant on your smartphone, but that would be icing on the cake. Owlet also recently added Owlet360, a $10 a month subscription level to get more trend analysis-style features. You can still get some features for free, like vitals monitoring and real-time alerts. —Emily Peck
★ New Owlet Camera: Owlet just announced the Dream Sight ($100) camera, which is a more affordable but still-smart camera option. It has a video quality from 1080 to 2K HD, 5GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities for setup, and 256-bit encryption, plus it's $60 less than the Cam 2. It'll retail for $100 and be part of the new Dream Duo 3 set with the Dream Sock ($380).