Created by a dad and baby product store owner, Wishbone is a smart thermometer designed to make the fiddly process of taking a baby’s temperature easier. With about a week left to go in its Kickstarter campaign, Wishbone has raised more than $140,000, blowing past its $20,000 goal.
Now the project’s developers, Shenzhen, China-based Joywing Tech, are aiming for a stretch goal that includes a mode designed to take the temperature of pets and integration with iOS HealthKit.
Wishbone can also be used to take ambient temperatures or or on objects like a bottle of baby formula. The device starts at $33 and is slated to ship in April.
Joywing Tech founders Harry Hu and Robin Gong developed Wishbone because traditional thermometers are difficult to use on a sick and cranky baby. Parents usually have to hold their child down or wake them up from a nap at regular intervals to make sure their fevers aren’t getting worse.
Wishbone is Y-shaped, with a 45-degree angle, and designed to plug into an Android or iOS smartphone’s headphone jack, with an infrared sensor in one end and a battery in the other. To use Wishbone, parents point the sensor three to five centimeters away from their child’s head and wait about two seconds for it to detect a temperature, which is recorded in Wishbone’s companion app.
Hu claims Wishbone’s accuracy is comparable to a traditional contact thermometer at a range of +/- 0.2 degrees Celsius.
There are already plenty of smart thermometers out there (including Kinsa, which recently raised a $9.6 million Series A). There are also many relatively inexpensive infrared thermometers that save parents and their babies from the discomfort of armpit or rectal temperature readings.
Wishbone hopes its small size, quicker temperature readings, and additional functions will let it stand out.
Hu says he is confident Wishbone will meet its shipping goal because it already has working samples and most of the work left to do is on the app development side.