Busy toddlers keep their parents on their toes during the day as they explore everything going on around them but a few are just as active at night.
This is what happened to Krista Teare when she went to check on her two-year -old son Declan in the morning and found him sleeping with the sprinkler that had been on their porch the night before.
“At first I was like this is kind of funny. What a weird thing to be sleeping with but then I realized he’d been out of our house in the night and he brought this back in and I was terrified,” says Teare.
She immediately went on-line to try to find a solution but there wasn’t anything on the market that could help her and the idea of the Toddler Monitor was born.
Teare and her friend Lisa Caruso Ruigrok began working together on this product.
Through friends they were introduced to an industrial designer in Calgary and he helped them come up with the concept and how it would work.
“We did some research to think about what we thought it should look like and then we did a bit of an RFP to find companies in Canada that would do a project like this and we landed in one out of Ottawa,” says Teare.
“It’s a super simple motion sensor device enclosed by plastic and silicon so it’s super safe for kids and super easy to use,” says Caruso Ruigrok.
The Toddler Monitor device around a doorknob and you simply download the app to your phone and anytime the monitor is moved; an alert is sent to your phone.
There may also be a secondary market for this monitor.
“Another use for this product is adults Alzheimer's or dementia, adults with disabilities so a device that helps their caregiver monitor their movements,” says Caruso Ruigrok.
They started their kickstarter campaign just last week and already have $20,000.00 in sales from all over North America and Europe.
Production on Toddler Monitor will begin in a few months and they hope to begin shipping the first 5,000 units in July.
Initially, Toddler Monitor will be sold on-line but Teare and Caruso Ruigrok hope to be selling Toddler Monitor in retails stores across Canada next year.
