About a year and a half ago Jennie Rubinshteyn and Yaroslav Faybishenko’s 1-year-old daughter was crying in the back seat of their car.
“I was being paranoid. I couldn’t stop asking myself and my husband, ‘What is in her diaper? What’s in her diaper?” Rubinshteyn, 35, told ABC News. Faybishenko responded, “Data is her diaper. Urine is full of so much health information.”
And that, the couple says, was the start of a new family business in making what they call “Smart Diapers.” No, the diapers don’t send tweets or alerts about when there’s pee or poop inside — that’s still a job for Huggies’ TweetPee app. Instead, the husband-wife team have invented a regular disposable diaper with a medical trick — it collects information about a child’s urine.
A dry-reagent panel, just like those colorful sticks you pee on at the doctor, sits on the front of the diaper. It works a lot like a QR code. Using the Smart Diapers iOS and Android app, a parent can scan the panel and see information about the urine.