What’s a “Data Point” and Why Should Parents Care?
Every beep, click, and photo your baby monitor makes could be another piece of your child’s digital puzzle. That puzzle is built out of “data points.” But what exactly is a data point, and why should you care?
The Definition In Plain English
A “data point” is simply one single piece of information:
Temperature in nursery: 20.4°C at 2:03 AM” — that’s a single data point.
Other examples could be a heart rate reading, a single frame of video, or a short sound clip.
One data point might seem harmless on its own — like a single pixel in a photo. But pixels add up. You’d be surprised how much data a baby monitor could harvest. Let’s think for a moment of the most basic monitor — one that does only audio and video. Audio along could, for example, allow a company to know how well your baby sleeps. Do they wake up every 20mins (like we know they sometimes do!). Maybe you need to see an advert about a “new and revolutionary vitamin that keeps you sharp and alert”. Or, perhaps, just from the audio, a company could tell your baby has a new cough, and categorise it as a dry cough and target you with an ad.
Or, even more worryingly, perhaps they could categorise that cough as Covid19, and increase future health insurance premiums for your child 18 years in the future. It sounds a little far fetched, but this is possible, a published paper [1] shows that it’s not only possible to diagnose COVID-19 with audio alone, but it can be done with greater than 70% accuracy!
Now, that was just a few examples with audio (let us put aside analysis on what books we could be reading to them before bed, what’s their favourite book, what questions they ask us before they sleep, what we tell our other half, etc, etc, etc). Video has a wealth more of information. Incredibly subtle changes in pixels* can let you ‘see’ how blood flows through the body [2], heart rates, etc. Not too mention just ‘seeing’ what’s in the baby’s room, toys, night lights, etc.
* a pixel is just a small square in a digital image.
Small Pieces Make A Big Picture
Your baby monitor could be collecting thousands of these data points every day:
Temperature changes
Noise levels
Movement patterns
Breathing rates
Individually, they mean very little. But when combined, they create patterns:
Sleep cycles
Illness trends
Daily routines
“Think of it like a connect-the-dots game, one dot is meaningless, but connect enough and you see the full picture.”
We already touched on video being data rich. HD video is extremely data rich. There are subtle changes in video imperceptible to us parents, but can be extracted using computers. It’s a bit like bats, the animal that is. They can hear incredibly well — so well in fact they can hear sound bouncing off objects, and they use this to understand their surroundings. We can’t do that — but it doesn’t mean, with the correct tools like computers, we couldn’t get access to that data.
Why This Matters For Your Child’s Future
Here’s where it gets important: data points can be linked with other sources to uniquely identify someone, even without names or faces (although, given how prolific social media is, connection names to faces, and then to these data metrics, is trivial).
Companies might use them for:
Marketing and advertising
Medical research (without your consent)
Training AI systems
Increase insurance premiums
And even “harmless” readings today could become highly valuable in the future. Micro-movement patterns, for example, might one day reveal early signs of health conditions. If someone else owns that data, they own those insights too.
Sentinel doesn’t allow this data to leave the safety of your home. You own your data, as you should.
