The smart diaper is having its second act

Pampers Lumi launched to polite press and quiet sales. A Bluetooth clip that tells you your baby is wet turned out to be a solution most parents felt they already had — their nose, and a cry.

But the sensor stack has not gone away. It's being redeployed. The same wetness-detection substrate is now appearing in enterprise pilots for daycare chains and, more interestingly, adult incontinence in nursing homes, where staffing shortages make automated wetness alerts a genuine operating-cost lever rather than a novelty.

For consumer diaper brands, the read-across is straightforward: the "smart diaper" line item is not dead, it just isn't a DTC story. The R&D quietly continues, and the brand that industrialises the sensor cost curve first will have optionality across categories that don't currently talk to each other.