This The Netatmo Healthy Home Coach is a baby monitor of a different stripe. It doesn’t actually watch or monitor baby, but monitors baby’s room (or any other room) for sound, humidity, and air quality. The Healthy Home Coach is marketed to all families but has a special value for parents of new babies.
The Healthy Home Coach comes in a sleek package like so many products in this category. The unit itself is designed to fit into a modern upscale environment and is quite striking in its iPhone-style rose gold styling. It clearly wants to look worth every cent of its $99 price tag. The challenge for the modern family is finding the room and outlets to position yet another tower next to your WIFI, Alexa, SONOS and other home devices.
Set up is pretty easy even versus many IoT (internet of things) devices we’ve seen. Make sure your phone or tablet is on your home WIFI and a few seconds after the Healthy Home Coach goes looking for your device, it links it up. In a first I’ve seen, the device itself creates its own WIFI that the app itself knows to connect to to complete the pairing process. This makes pairing the device with your account on your Android (4.2 or later)or iOS device dead easy.
The Home Coach monitors air quality level, humidity, temperature and noise measurement with three profiles possible for different conditions:
- baby
- child/adult with asthma
- general users
For each type of user, you get a screen that glows blue, green, yellow or red depending on the condition. Blue is the best level with green being a close second.
Clicking on individual readings gives you an explanation of what the readings mean.
When I changed from “general users,” my ratings for each measure did not change. However, suddenly my “excellent” rating for humidity turned into a “fair” rating and the screen went from blue to green (sorta good). You would be correct in very quickly seeing that “baby” and “asthmatic” settings just mean lower trigger levels.
You can go back into the app and monitor how the environment has changed hour to hour. You’ll also get alerts if any of the levels go beyond the green zone. If you turn up the stereo, prepare to be alerted. We had one reading for humidity that went to yellow zone. The warning suggested opening a window to bring the humidity down. This worked on a Fall day in San Francisco, but it made me wonder what would happen on a humid Summer day in Minnesota.
The Netatmo also pairs with the Apple Home Kit. This is cool, but be aware that you’ll need free storage in your iCloud account or else you’ll be prompted by Apple to buy more storage before you can use it.
Pros:
- Provides advice on how to create a healthier environment for baby, especially in terms of air quality and humidity.
- You can connect multiple Healthy Home Coaches to your smartphone to monitor several rooms.
Cons:
- At $99 a pop, it will cost you a small fortune to monitor the whole house.
- If you have alerts set up, you’ll be overwhelmed with ‘cry wolf” alarms. All it takes is one loud noise and you’re alerted by your phone. We tended to ignore warnings after a day of notifications.
- Requires free space in iCloud account for Apple Home Kit to work.
