Bellabeat’s new Shell app can capture the sound of your womb

Bellabeat, the company that makes health trackers designed to look like jewelry, has developed an app for expecting parents.

The new app, called Shell, works with an add-on. Together, they can record and listen to fetal heartbeats – without any Doppler technology. The Shell wraps around your iPhone much like a phone case and works with the free Shell app, which launched 1 November, to make it easy for you to capture a baby’s heartbeat and share it. The Shell app records the sound of your womb via the iPhone’s built-in microphone.

While the new app can isolate the sound of the heartbeat through an algorithm that “amplifies key tones and filters out background noise”, the Shell add-on has a horn that focuses the sound waves of a fetal heartbeat and improves the sound reproduction of your iPhone’s speaker. It also physically separates the mic and speaker, cancelling all possible sound oscillations.

Shell is basically a non-invasive prenatal monitor that amplifies the sound of your baby’s heartbeat. Belkabeat has experience in making wearables for the fashionably-conscious, so it’s describing the add-on as having a shape and functionality that resembles a seashell. The wave pattern “illustrates the soothing rythmic sound of the heartbeat,” it explained.

It’s not yet clear when the Shell add-on will be available to purchase, but you can already start playing with the free Shell iPhone app. Bellabeat apparently had a million people on the app’s waitlist at launch.

There’s no word yet if an Android app is in the works.