It is common knowledge that babies and small children fall asleep in the car quite easily. This could be a few things, the muffled engine noise, the slight vibration of the car, a regulated temperature. Furthermore it could be a conditioned response: when kids are put in a seat and strapped in, they can’t really move around much and are kind of forced to relax. They have probably slept in the car before so are conditioned to do it again.
Using this knowledge, Ford is promoting it’s new vehicle range with “Max Motor Dreams”, a baby crib that reproduces the sounds, movement and light of a parent’s car. Parents are even able to use an app to collect data from routes and replay it in the crib at home.
It seems super novel, and for a minute I thought it was an April Fools’ prank, but on second thought it is not such a crazy idea. We know that this combination of sound, light and movement works to put kids to sleep. So why not take it out of it’s original context and try to recreate it. It is an interesting experiment. What other environments could we recreate in another context to evoke a certain physiological response?