by Joyce Slaton posted in Products & Prizes

Getting your baby to sleep is one of the toughest parts of early parenting, and gear companies keep trying to invent ways to help you do it. New baby monitor Nanit has a drop-dead futuristic premise: a motion-sensor camera watches your baby sleep, tells you when she's awake, and gives you an algorithm-crunched score in the morning to tell you how well she -- and by extension, you -- slept. It's so sci fi it's positively Blade Runner-y.
Nanit, which is now in pre-order, certainly looks different from other monitor cameras, typically set up on a wall or shelf near the baby's crib and giving a slanted view in which details may be obscured. The Nanit camera is mounted on a heavy tip-proof stand that looks something like a floor lamp. It plugs into the wall with the camera up and over your baby's crib, giving a birds' eye view of the sleepy proceedings that parents can watch on their smart device.
But that's hardly the Nanit's marquee attraction. Parents who shell out for a monthly data subscription also get Nanit Insights -- the camera watches, records, and analyzes your baby's sleep, using an algorithm that looks at your baby's body movements to judge whether she's asleep or awake, total hours of sleep, and if a parent intervened during the night. In the morning, Nanit Insights generates a color-coded sleep "score" that apparently causes couples to do victory arm-pumps if the Nanit video is to be believed:

Nanit Ins...