Hear My Baby Heartbeat Monitor

What it does

Hear My Baby Heartbeat Monitor is a pregnancy keepsake app from App Bards. It uses a phone’s microphone to try to capture sounds from the womb, then lets users save and share recordings. It is aimed at expectant parents who want to make a personal memento or share an experience with family, rather than people looking for clinical monitoring.

What to expect

Capturing a clear sound depends on conditions such as background noise, phone placement and the phone’s microphone. The app offers recording guidance, but a phone microphone is not a medical device, and an unclear or absent recording does not tell you whether a pregnancy is healthy. Do not use it to check fetal wellbeing or as a substitute for advice from a qualified healthcare professional.

Because recording is central to the app, it needs access to the microphone for that purpose. Users should also consider where recordings are stored and who they choose to share them with.

Where it fits

Compared with a dedicated fetal Doppler, this app does not require separate monitoring hardware, but it also should not be treated as a way to assess a baby’s heartbeat. Its more suitable role is informal recording and sharing. Results may vary with the phone and surroundings, so it may not deliver a usable recording every time.

Listing snapshot

The app has a 4.49 rating from 14,661 ratings and more than 1,000,000 installs. Those figures indicate substantial use, but they do not establish that the app can reliably detect a fetal heartbeat or provide medical reassurance.