Listening To Your Baby

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Hear My Baby is designed to allow you to hear your baby, but isn’t foolproof and it may take a number of attempts to find it. Medical Professionals frequently need a few attempts, even when using ultrasound, because your body is a surprisingly noisy place and your baby can be surprisingly agile!

With a bit of patience and concentration though, most people find what they are looking for within a few attempts and are able to record and share that special moment.

Checklist

There is a lot you can do to stack the odds in your favour. So, firstly, make sure you are ready to listen:

  1. Remove your phone case.

  2. Put iOS into airplane mode.

  3. Go to a quiet room without background noise.

  4. Adjust your volume to 20-30% and check you’re not on mute.

  5. Make sure you know where your microphone is.

  6. Be sure to find your own heartbeat first!

We don’t recommend trying to listen to your bump until at least 16 weeks and best results around 27-30 weeks.

Technique

Remember, HMB is similar to a stethoscope. It uses your microphone to listen for noises inside you. There is some clever frequency filtering and signal processing going on to focus in on baby sounds, but the more quiet and relaxed you are the better. You also need to get as close as possible to your baby’s back, just like a doctor would. ❤️

⚠️ Important

To hear inside your body your microphone must make good contact with your skin. Press the bottom end of your phone firmly into your flesh at the correct location. It helps to know exactly where your microphone is. Read more.

  1. Relax. It is easier to find the baby’s sound when sitting comfortably or lying down in a relaxed position.

  2. Be still and wait 10-20 seconds, listening for a rhythmic sound.

  3. if you hear lots of other noise, take a breath and focus again on relaxing and being still. Closing your eyes can help.

  4. If you don’t hear a quality sound just move the phone to a new location and try again.

See below for the best locations to try.

★ TIPS:

  • Once in position, hold the phone completely still to avoid movement-noise.

  • Relax your muscles to reduce noise from muscular contractions.

  • Try pausing or relaxing your breathing to reduce noise from your lungs and bronchia.

  • Occasionally check again that your microphone is making good contact.

  • No luck? No problem! Just move on to the next location.

Where to look

The best location depends entirely on the position of your baby and your placenta. You are aiming to have the baby's back next to the microphone.

So, before you start, try to think about where your baby is right now, which way they are facing and which way up they are. This can be tricky at first but you will naturally get better at it throughout your pregnancy, with or without HMB.

If you’re not sure, generally the lower front part of your tummy is a good place to start.

Other things to consider

  1. Sometime the baby is just not in the right position and you may need to wait a few hours for them to move. It is important to persevere and not be disheartened if it proves difficult the first few times. Good things come to those who wait!

  2. Try turning the phone at an angle, as the screen doesn't have to face the floor or your face. But do make sure the microphone is always making full contact. It’s the conduction of sound through your amniotic fluid that makes all this possible.

  3. Try a number of times and at different times of day. Your baby moves around and the app needs to have the baby’s heart be close to the microphone to work well. We often receive a number of negative reviews because people don't have the patience to wait for the baby to be in the correct position. Please understand patience is a necessary requirement.

  4. It took Claire (in the pictures above) 10 days to make a good recording and to learn the signs from her baby as to where best to look. She first found her baby at 23 weeks. These pictures were taken at 26 weeks and, by this time, she was finding the sound regularly. HMB is a learning process since every pregnancy is different.

  5. Double check your sound volume is turned up (but not too high!), sometimes having the sound on mute can be the most obvious fault.

  6. Check you don't have the sound too high otherwise you may get a false positive caused by a feedback loop. We recommend 1/3 to 1/2 volume when listening to prevent this. However, for the very very best results please use Bluetooth Headsets or Apple Airpods.

  7. We don’t recommend trying until at least 16 weeks and best results are often around 27-30 weeks when the baby is bigger and stronger.

❤️ ❤️ ❤️
CONTACT OUR SUPPORT TEAM

Please do contact us if you still have problems. We want to help you get an amazing result and have a wonderful experience using our app. We promise it does work as you can see by examples on our instagram and facebook pages.

Yes, I've done all that, and still can't find it...

In some, not many, but some cases, it may not be possible, or the sounds may be difficult to hear due to the position of your placenta. This is because the placenta can be towards the front of the tummy making it very difficult to hear the acoustics of the baby. Give it a little while though as it could just be that the baby is in the wrong position, and it does take a bit of work to find, and depends too on how many weeks your baby is. It is unusual (but possible!) to hear results before 16-20 weeks.

If this is the case and you can't get a result, contact us and we'll explain how to get a refund from Apple. We want you to be delighted with HMB.