New Grad Designs PCBs for Smart Baby Beds

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

The best ideas in the electronics industry improve the quality of our lives. At AltiumLive, I ran into Tamara Jovanovic, a new PCB designer and junior electrical engineer with Happiest Baby, a Los Angeles-based company that makes smart beds that can protect babies from crib death. After joking that I save the world from dangling participles while she’s saving babies, I asked Tamara to tell us more about smart baby beds, and how she got into PCB design in the first place.

Andy Shaughnessy: Tamara, you are a brand-new designer and a freshly minted EE. How did you wind up being a circuit board designer?

Jovanovic: I went to college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and I just graduated in May. I was looking for a job and was lucky enough to get an interview with Happiest Baby. I'd heard of them before, and I know about their CEO, Dr. Harvey Karp, who is amazing. He's a very famous pediatrician, and I guess they liked me during the interview so here I am.

Shaughnessy: Do you have an EE degree?

Jovanovic: Yes, I graduated in electrical engineering with a minor in applied math. I was a rower in college too, so I did rowing and engineering. It was an interesting four years, but it was worth it.

Shaughnessy: When you were in school, did you know that you wanted to be a circuit board designer? If not, what was your original plan?

Jovanovic: The plan was to study electrical engineering. I am actually from Serbia, so I only came here four years ago when I was 18. I didn't know anything about PCBs until my junior year of college. I wish my school offered more courses on it, but they don’t. I started getting into it a little bit on my own. Once I got my job, it's something that they expected me to do, so I have to get better at it.

Shaughnessy: Does your company use Altium tools?

Jovanovic: Exactly, we use their tools to design and evaluate PCBs for our products.

Shaughnessy: Your company makes safe baby beds that keep infants from having SIDS and problems like that?

Jovanovic: Yes. At Happiest Baby, we make a bassinet called the Snoo; it's a smart baby bed, which moves on its own and produces white noise sounds that soothe the baby on its own. We like to say that we're the safest baby bed out there because the infant is swaddled and clipped in; only then, can the Snoo turn on and start moving. There is no accidental rolling or suffocation, God forbid. It's very safe and is basically an extra set of hands for the parents because they can leave the baby in it without having to be attached while taking a shower or making a meal.

To read this entire interview, which appeared in the October 2018 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.