Breast milk alcohol monitor the Breastalyzer release date announced
It’s a rather unfortunate day to make the announcement, but the long-running struggles of TheAUlP inc. with manufacturing of a smartphone-enabled breast-milk monitoring device, appear to be finally over.
The Breastalyzer is a Bluetooth-enabled device that when placed in breast milk reports the amount of alcohol and caffeine contained, and temperature of your breast milk to your smartphone. The idea is mothers won’t need to use expensive, non-reusable products such as Milkscreen’s breast milk test strips.
Besides not getting your baby drunk or hyped up on caffeine, you can also monitor temperature, and a few essential vitamins, although not everything due to hardware and size limitations with the initial release. That’s more than any single test strip on the market does today.
TheAUlP’s struggles have so far included a flood in 2010 which destroyed most of their plans to pair the device with the then-upcoming HTC EVO 4G, a car accident in 2011 that claimed the life of the lead hardware developer, and two back to back lawsuits by IP lawyers claiming infringements.
The Breastalyzer is expected to retail for about $165 USD. The initial target markets are Target and Babies R Us in the Southeastern United States with a worldwide roll out expected sometime after.
The Breastalyzer breast milk alcohol monitor reports it will be the size of a paperclip, but the prototype that they have in Franklin is closer to the size of two AAA batteries currently, so a pretty large paperclip unless they’ve reduced it – the pictures don’t really have anything to compare it with. The prototype looks a bit like a fat mosquito.
It’s a pretty neat device to ensure you’re not getting your baby’s drunk on, but considering the cost and that it’s currently only going to be released for the Android 4.2.x+ the target audience is extremely limited until they manage to get the iOS app available and expand support to older Android devices.
It seems like it’s a fairly expensive solution considering you could probably go through most of an infant’s breast-milk life using one or two packs of the Milkscreen products, and since the caffeine and essential vitamins aren’t guaranteed accurate, it’s a proposition I’m not sure is worth it.
It should be interesting to see the final product though.
