My baby got muscular hypotonia so I made an app for that
My beautiful baby girl was born in September 2021. It was the happiest and the scariest moment of my life. We were first time parents.
We prepared for our newborn the usual way – educating ourselves from various reputable source. Everything was progressing as it should.
Until she was about 6 weeks old. We went for a regular check-up and after doing the exam, the doctor said: your baby has muscular hypotonia.
As far as things that can be wrong with your child go, this was pretty benign. It does, however, always produce a shock response, hearing that there is something wrong with your child.
Our doctor made an appointment for us to see a specialist and advised we do more tummy time exercises. Easier said than done!
We were doing tummy time exercise and the only way to grab our baby’s attention was to present black and white high contrast cards and move them up to make her head rise. But her attention was very limited with this – we are talking about less than 30 seconds!
Being an app developer, I decided this was not good enough and made an app that does exactly that: helps babies and parents to do tummy time exercises.
The tummy time app concept was simple and based on real-world toys we had: it had to be easy on the eyes of a newborn, high-contrast and should help with head raising.
This how my tummy time helper caterpillar idea was born – a simple black (or white) caterpillar on a white (or black) background that travels from bottom to the top of the screen, capturing a baby’s attention to follow it.
After developing the base app, I’ve also added the ability to feed the caterpillar leaves because the next step in baby development is to exercise hand-eye coordination. And I’ve also added the ability to turn on the camera so they can watch themselves while looking at the caterpillar because babies looove to watch themselves.
My baby was doing tummy time exercises 10x longer with the app than without it. When we eventually had a specialist checkup, the specialist doctor said our child’s motor skills are above average and that there is no sign of muscular dystrophy.
If you have a newborn, you can download the app here completely free:
People are using it and the average session time is about 10mins per day. I would say that is a big success for babies & parents doing tummy time exercises.
