Empathic Directions for The Sounds of Parenting Technology: The Case of Baby Monitors

Recent advancements in technology have introduced new interactions into the inherently empathic connection between parents and infants, as exemplified by the baby monitor. While promising to sense and track infants' well-being, interaction with these devices rarely accommodates parental empathy in its various embodied aspects. This position paper addresses this gap by focusing on their sounds. While baby monitors typically consist of symbolic and abstract cues, embodied sound practices may better attend to the empathic nature of parental care. By juxtaposing empathic phenomena with current interactive sound practices, we highlight two possible design research directions: embodied alerts and empathic sonification. Through their discussion, we wish to contribute to the critical discourse on parenting technologies and the caring ecologies within which they exist, and inspire audible experiments that resonate with the uniquely empathic relationships between parents and their infants.