Lately I've been thinking about smart watches and control for young children. My son also wants a smart watch. Some of these watches may be interesting as a tool for the development of the autonomy of the child. Others, however, have become a tool for parents and corporations. They use control over the child through the application, which implies a greater attention of the child and their parents.

Smart watches that are being sold with this control logic increase the need to increase children’s behavior and body control. At the same time, they have become a requirement for many children to be part of the group of friends. The marketing route has therefore been very well designed and behind this design lies a data exploitation with the potential to promote multiple business models.

Ten years ago, I myself, with some friends, did a project of this kind using the Arduino platform. This was a health-related project for monitoring young sick children while they slept. I met with several doctors and we took a little prototype out of the project, it wasn't very good. Our knowledge was also small and the time we could spend on it, and we abandoned it. But I think there's a difference between monitoring a person when he's sick and monitoring a person all the time. These devices have created the need for us to monitor our children's bodies at all times. Will the next step not be the conquest of children's bodies? Would we internalize biometric control technology in their bodies? Will we have cyborg children? How will that change the relationships between parents and children? Maybe, when you're thinking about buying a device like this, one way to decide can be to think for who the device really is.