Tweeting From The Womb

Update: Corey Menscher, the creator of The Kickbee, left a comment below explaining why he developed The Honeycomb and answered some of your concerns.

No you didn’t read that wrong, unborn babies can now send Tweets from the womb. Creepy sounding isn’t it?

After you get past the initial “ick” factor of this, it’s not that disturbing… actually it’s quite interesting but, do you think Tweeting from the womb is taking social media too far? Tell us.

Corey Menscher, an NYU student, has developed a suite of devices entitled “The Honeycomb“, the first of which is “The Kickbee“.

The Kickbee allows physically separated spouses to connect with one another by transmitting fragments of sensory experiences of prototypical parenting activities from various stages of babyhood. In order to pass long the information, The Kickbee utilizes the popular microblogging service Twitter as a platform to record and distribute “kicks” to fathers as mobile phone text messages, thanks to its publicly available Application Programming Interface (API).

In layman’s terms: Whenever your kiddo kicks… you get a Tweet about it.

On the technical side of things, a series of vibration sensors are attached to the belt longitudinally so their sensing areas can register the vibrations within the torso generated by a third-trimester baby. A microcontroller receives these signals, performs software filtering and processing, and transmits validated “kick” signals wirelessly to a custom Java application running on a personal computer.

Personally, back when my wife was pregnant (my son was born January 15, 2009) I would call my wife several times a day for general check-ins to see if the baby had been kicking much. I always enjoyed hearing about it, as it helped ease my worrisome mind, I guess.

I’m not saying that we would’ve used this product, but it would’ve been nice knowing when the baby was kicking.

As I mentioned above The Honeycomb also has two other stages, they are “The Burpbee” and “The Bathbee“. Judging by the names you can probably tell what they’re about.

The Burpbee transmits the warmth of a baby’s body on one parent’s shoulder to the other over a distance. It consists of two objects: a “transmitter” in the form of a burp cloth, and a “receiver” in the form of a men’s button-down shirt. The heater warms slowly, and after 30 seconds has reached its peak temperature of about 110º fahrenheit

In layman’s terms: Whenever your kiddo is burping… your shoulder area gets hot, as if you’re the one doing the burping.

The Bathbee is an olfactory bathtime awareness device for a parent who is away from home. It consists of two objects: a “transmitter” in the form of a rubber ducky bath toy, and a “receiver” in the form of a rubber ducky-themed children’s lunchbox. When the bath toy is being actively played with in a bathtub, it transmits the smells of bathtime over a distance by filling the room with the scent of baby oil.

In layman’s terms: Whenever your kiddo is getting a bath… your room begins to smell of baby oil.

I can see the allure of The Kickbee… but the other two are kind of a stretch in my opinion.

What are your thoughts on The Kickbee and the other Honeycomb devices – Creepy or Innovative?