Our youngest (15m) has recently started sleeping through the night on her own, without us needing to get up for feeding or settling. But she's still waking ( one of) us up, because she often cries a bit before falling back asleep. Turning the monitor off entirely is an option, but then if something were pretty wrong (ex: vomiting) we might keep sleeping. I'd be interested in a monitor with a configurable delay: only turn on the monitor if they've been crying for, say, 8min.
A monitor like this would also be useful for sleep training. One common approach is to pick some sort of timing pattern for when to go back in to settle the baby, and not go back in before then. For example, you might settle them, and then hope they stop crying and fall asleep, but if they're still crying in 15min you repeat. Trying to ignore someone you're very attached to cry while trying to remember when exactly it will have been 15min while super sleepy is not fun. If baby monitors had configurable snooze buttons, after settling the baby you could snooze the monitor and try to fall back asleep. If you're lucky they fall back asleep before the fifteen minutes are up, and you more sleep.
There are a bunch of ways to make this fancier, including only counting crying and not other noises or identifying unusual crying, but even something basic like turning on when the average recent volume reaches a threshold would be very helpful.
I did find someone who built a prototype using a phone, with a much shorter delay (10s). I can't find any products, though. Would other people find this useful?
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Let's say you're a baby. You reach the end of a sleep cycle and become partially alert. What do you do? Ideally, if nothing is wrong, you settle back in for another sleep cycle. But this is something babies need to learn to do, and while some of them pick this up very quickly others initially come to full alertness every time and won't doze back off without some combination of cuddles, noise, and motion. Sleep training is essentially a collection of strategies for teaching babies (a) the skill of falling back to sleep on their own ("self soothing") and (b) when they should use it.
In this case Nora has already solidly learned (a) and mostly learned (b) but still tests the boundaries some times. For example, we were recently on vacation in a tightly packed house (28 people in a 5br) and Nora quickly figured out that every time she cried at night she pretty quickly got cuddles and nursing (because we didn't want her to wake up our older kids, 8y and 6y, sleeping in the same room). Over the course of the week she started crying more and more often during the night, correctly (and unfortunately) learning that the adult-implemented pattern for when she needed to go back to sleep on her own had shifted. After we got back home, we had about a week of gradually re-teaching her the normal pattern.