Happiest Baby's SNOO: secure, real-time connected cribs

The Happiest Baby SNOO Smart Sleeper is the safest, most effective baby bed ever made. It was named the winner in Innovation for the BIG (Business Intelligence Group) and the winner of Baby Safety for The Bump Best of Baby Tech at CES 2017.

SNOO quickly soothes infant crying and boosts sleep with the same rhythmic sensations babies enjoy in the womb. SNOO’s smart technology responds to crying by choosing the level of increased white noise and rocking most likely to calm the upset baby, just like an experienced parent. And, it helps parents figure out when their baby just wants a bit of soothing or needs more help (like a feeding or diaper change).

With its mobile app, parents can change SNOO’s soothing level and adjust its settings (including feature to easily wean babies off motion all night) to allow for seamless transition to a crib.

Finding PubNub

Early in 2016, SNOO was almost ready for mass production, but needed one last piece for its architecture: a real-time infrastructure.

The Happiest Baby development team was experiencing unreliable communication between mobile devices and SNOO with homegrown REST API’s which used HTTP polling behind the scenes. The team first looked to MQTT as an alternative solution, but also discovered PubNub in their search.

After comparing PubNub with MQTT, the team chose to move forward with PubNub. Happiest Baby’s Head of Software Development Mika Saryan explains that

PubNub is a much easier option, being more reliable to implement, maintain, and scale. Support was also a crucial factor in choosing PubNub. We wanted to find a platform that would make it easier to troubleshoot between multiple teams (embedded, mobile, backend) and PubNub has many tools to simplify the process.

Security Concerns

VP of Product Development at Happiest Baby, Peter Fornell, advises that security is paramount for smart sleepers. "Ultimately, our security must be as advanced as possible to maintain our customers’ trust and ensure their experience is top-notch."

Realizing they would have to create their own access control layer, hire security experts, and deal with continual security patching, auditing, and testing, Happiest Baby was further convinced of the value of selecting PubNub for their real-time infrastructure.

PubNub Footprint

SNOO uses PubNub for almost all communication between their backend, mobile app, and the SNOO bassinet.

Anything requiring real-time essentially uses PubNub. This includes control commands, baby status, state updates, all the important logs, etc, Mika

SNOO had a very specific use case for push notifications which was “very easy to implement with PubNub Functions,” triggering push notifications in response to certain user states and device events.

It’s easy to build a demo showing how fantastic other [open-source] solutions are, until you put it in a production environment and run into problems trying to scale it. With PubNub, we are both reducing our risk and getting our product to market significantly faster, Peter