Owlet Dream

I only use the Owlet Dream Sock and although I am pleased with the sock itself and it’s designed purpose of helping keep my mind at ease while my baby sleeps, I am not impressed with the app itself. It takes several “refreshes” and even closing and re-opening the app in order to see the current sleep state. I wish the app would provide some sort of chart that shows awake, light and deep sleep patterns. My Apple Watch tells me more about my sleep patterns than the Owlet does for my baby. Lastly there should be some sort of turn off or check-in button when it’s having “difficulty getting readings”. There will be times where I’m holding my baby, I know he’s fine and even though I dismiss the notification the base will still continue to sound and it’s frustrating. Also I had to move the base to his actual changing table because otherwise when I take it off the base as I’m getting him ready for bed the sock will start alarming if I don’t put it on asap. I’ll snooze the base and it will literally go off in what feels like another minute. There could maybe be some sort of, ready to start tracking sleep button. Overall, the sock does it’s job of keeping track of my baby’s heart rate, oxygen level and sleep status but doesn’t do much more than that. You’d think for $300 the app would be better.

I write this at 3am due to my disappointment in this app. Anyone who has a baby wants this app to function properly. I have the camera, no sock (glad I didn’t waste that money), simply because it was supposed to be the better video monitor with background feed. However, even while I was pregnant my friends had issue with how unreliable the app could be for them and their baby. I am often alone at night due to my husband’s work schedule, so I need to be able to run the app in the background of my phone while sleeping so that I can hear if my baby wakes up and needs me. Tonight is the second night in a row that I’ve woken up to find that the app has crashed and will not reload unless I force restart my phone, and then “Try Again” 5x to reconnect to my camera. Not only that, but when the app fails it tends to stop my notifications all together from making any alerts at all. My alarms do not ring, phone calls do not come through. So if I’m in a good sleep, I notice nothing unless I naturally wake up on my own. I can’t simply leave my app off overnight in hopes the notification alert will wake me, it won’t. The sound of my baby crying would, though, which is the whole point of having this camera and app. So that I can be stirred awake by the sound of my baby, look at her video feed to determine if she’s able to self soothe, and be able to receive phone calls or texts from my husband in case my app fails. I can’t consistently say I get that, and it really concerns and upsets me.

For something so extremely expensive I fail to see why this app is complete garbage. 1. The base will go off during the night due to “sock placement issue” mind you my baby could be completely still for over half an hour and it will randomly go off and say there is an issue only for it to act perfectly fine after closing out the app a million times. 2. When you first open the app and it says “___ is awake” it glitches all the time and instead of that it says “wokeUp” spelt just like that. Not to mention in the same place where it tells you their sleep status the text is almost always cut off. Right now it’s telling me my baby’s next predicted sleep and the bottom text is cut off there is no way to scroll to see the whole thing. Example: “baby’s sleep window started _________” and then you see text at the bottom that is cut off. 3. Looking in the history section and clicking on any of the sleep sessions is a nightmare. The times don’t match when you are sliding the little dial to see if your baby was awake/asleep during the night. It also is a very inconvenient way to check the sessions because the graphs are so inaccurate. 4. Checking on the app throughout the night is irritating because even if I have already closed out of the app and open it back up I have to close the app a million more times in order for me to even get a live reading or check sleep status. If I could sue for this being a trash product I would. Save your money and buy something cheaper. Owlet is not it.