Nowadays, baby product is a big market with unlimited potentials as demand is growing with rising birth rate and more well-educated and middle-class parents can afford and are willing to pay for better and high-tech baby products. 

One of most parents’ top concerns is feeding.  Parents make every effort to make sure that their babies are eating well and forming a good eating habit.  Parents need to mark down the feeding records in a small note book which is not convenient in storage nor searching previous records.  

Discovering such potential, Dual Degree Program in Technology and Management (T&M-DDP) students Juliana Ko and Raymond Tam together with Ambi Yuen, MPhil student in Electronic and Computer Engineering jointly invented a smart baby diet tracker device to keep track of baby feeding.  “Most smart products now serve the needs of adults but not baby.  Baby cannot speak out its need and express its own feelings well, babies need smart products to speak for them.” said Juliana.   

The invention named Feedi Baby is a lightweight electronic device comprising an electronic scale for measuring feeding information and a silicone adaptor for conforming with different milk bottles.  It is connected with a smart phone via Bluetooth and provides analysis of babies’ drinking patterns with the mobile application created by Raymond.  The application will provide customized feeding advice for each baby based on their individual diet and growth patterns by using Big Data Analytic. 

In the process of design, Juliana and teammates did surveys among parents with infants at Maternal and Child Health Centres and online to understand parents’ needs; from the professional perspective, they interviewed pediatricians and nurses to acquire knowledge about proper baby feeding. 

Innovation and hard work reward them with many awards at design and start-up competitions such as top honor at HKUST’s Healthcare Designathon Competition 2015, Bronze Award at Hong Kong ICT Awards 2016, finalist of Engineering Medical Innovation Global Competition 2015, 15 finalists at Google Empowering Young Entrepreneurs Program 2016 and more.

Juliana believed that Dual Degree Program had helped her a lot to setup this startup.  Although it’s too early to claim successful, she has already taken a big step forward.  She valued Dual Degree Program’s interdisciplinary curriculum to integrate knowledge of technology and business management which allows students to consider issues from both perspectives.  She highly recommended students to participate in Dual Degree Program’s International Business Competition and Corporate Project which guide them through the whole process of startup from idea development, pitching for investment to execution. 

Juliana wants to extend her heartfelt thanks to Prof. Betty LIN, Associate Director of Dual Degree Program and mentors from her previous internships for giving very practical and valuable advices during the process.    

Feedi Baby is targeted to be launched this year and they plan to develop smarter baby products in future.