A new prenatal listening device lets the whole family tune in to the sounds of the impending offspring.
Called FirstSounds, the battery-powered system amplifies the heartbeat and other noises and feeds them into two earphone jacks-one for Mom, one for Dad. If siblings want to join in, there`s a speaker attachment that can let everybody hear.
”It`s really a way to promote bonding with the unborn child,” says Kathy Bethurum, a registered neonatal nurse in Portland, Ore., who conceived the idea for the product.
”I was pregnant with my first child, and, since I`m a nurse, I`ve got a stethoscope … and I would lie on the floor and use it to listen to the womb sounds,” she says.
But it was frustrating for Bethurum`s husband, Larry, to tune in, too. By the time she passed the stethoscope, the sounds often stopped or changed.
She decided there ought to be a way for everyone, not just medical professionals, to plug in to the prenatal sounds, so she worked with a doctor and her husband, an electrical engineer, to develop the product.
The device also includes a jack for a tape recorder and a cassette of fetal sounds.
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”So if you hear some strange sound, you can identify it,” says Mark Martinez, vice president of Unisar Inc., in New York, which is marketing the device. It is expected to debut in department stores and catalogs in June.
Bethurum, mother of three young children, says she hopes FirstSounds spurs increased health-consciousness among mothers-to-be.
”The whole idea is to tune in to the living person inside there,” she says. ”To think, `There really is somebody in there-I really should take better care of myself.”`