When you think of the connected home, your mind is immediately filled with images of gleaming white one-off boxes containing a Nest, or the yet-unrealized promise of Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Brillo. You certainly don’t think of Fuhu, manufacturer of affordable children’s tablets. That may be about to change.
While important details like pricing and exact availability remain elusive, Fuhu today has planted a flag---or rather, a variety of sensors---in the smart home space. Specifically, it hopes to provide a complete connected home, one that provides data designed specifically for parental peace of mind. Devices could range from an air quality sensor, to a button that keeps track of nursing times and duration, to a baby-wearable that notes sleeping patterns, oxygen levels, heart rate, and more.
Fuhu might seem like an unlikely source for such an aggressive release. While it also produces a kid-friendly camera and pair of headphones, it’s best-known for a range of tablets for tiny fingers. Adding as many as seven (or more) objects to that mix makes for a much broader portfolio. It all makes sense, though, Fuhu co-founder and President Robb Fujioka tells WIRED, if you consider it part of the company’s broader mission.
“We’ve always been in the business of experiences and solutions, says Fujioka. “IoT for me is kind of a natural next step. First, I’ve never really looked at us as a tablet company as much as a trusted brand for parents and children. And second, the IoT space is a really fragmented space in terms of total solutions.”
Fujioka points to Nest and Dropbox as examples of one-off smart devices that leave people in search of a more comprehensive plan wanting. The integrated, whole-home solutions that do exist, meanwhile, tend to be exorbitantly pricey. Fuhu proposes a happy—or at least, more manageable—medium. While the company will start with just four sensor-enabled objects in stores this holiday season, it plans to eventually broaden out by bundling its wares into age-appropriate packages. An imagined “Peace of Mind” bundle, for instance, could include a connected baby monitor, bottle, room monitor, nightlight, and scale, while a “3-5 Year Old Bundle” might focus more on wearables and communication tools.
As for price, Fujioka won’t say for now. He’s optimistic that his products will be a relative bargain, though, especially in a field where costs are often bloated. “The fundamental challenge for IoT guys is that many of them are approaching the business from a Kickstarter standpoint… the cost, quality, all of those things suffer when you’re going at it from a low-volume perspective.” Fuhu, meanwhile, has a sizable footprint that it hopes to translate into lower prices. Besides, it’s a company that’s not exactly known for sticker shock; the same people who sell a $100 tablet probably aren’t gunning for a $300 connected nightlight.
In addition to hinderances like exorbitant price and limited scope, Fujikoa reasons that the home industry in general still sits on cinder blocks because it just hasn’t found the right audience. Retrofitting your entire home takes more than just money; it takes time, patience, and serious commitment. (Expecting parents certainly have the latter, at least.)
“The time that you’re looking to invest in a smart home and smart devices is when you’re buying a new home, or remodeling, or have a new child coming into it,” says Fujikoa. "We believe that this vertical is the right one to kick-start IoT, because you have a motivated buyer who’s looking at how to transform their home for a new arrival.”
It’s true that parents—well, a lot of them anyway—are keen to track their child’s development; whether that impulse extends to a diaper-change-counting spotlight (one of the proposed devices) remains to be seen. Quantifying your kid certainly has plenty of benefits, but knowing a baby’s routine down to every last minute and ounce sounds a little like focusing so much on leaves, you miss the tree. Talk about helicopter parents.
And even those parents who do want a wearable device that “records and reports a child’s entire day,” as the 3-5 Year Old Bundle’s wearable proposes to, will have to reconcile all of that data collection with one of the other hesitations that have held up smart home adoption: security. While there hasn’t been a significant number of reported breaches, connected devices are inherently vulnerable. It’s easy enough to laugh off those concerns when they’re centered on your fridge, but a five-year-old commands an extra bit of caution.
Fujikoa’s confident, though, that his company has addressed the security issues, both through its own in-house measures and by partnering with Intel.
Besides, there’s still plenty of time to allay any concerns; it’ll be several months before the first devices hit stores, and the full bundles won’t be available until early next year. Whether Fuhu has figured out how to make the smart home truly take off will depend a lot on pricing and how well these products actually, well... work.
At the very least, though, it’s an approach to the connected home that really does feel focused, cohesive, and (probably) affordable. And for a certain kind of parent, it’s a whole lot of technology that adds up to some good old fashioned peace of mind.
