[vessenes]

How many diapers have you changed, out of curiosity? I've changed maybe 5,000 diapers (4 kids non-primary caregiver), and I feel confident that a shower head + hair dryer is not going to be safe or in fact work at all in many circumstances.

[numpad0]

Never actually... I think the key for the machine is to secure the baby in such ways that the pelvis stays at the same position in space, without breaking bones or tearing muscles. That's normally not possible because a human hand isn't big enough and grippy enough to hold them that way, and that allows the baby to slip out or wiggle around. But if you could, and if the I-shaped types of diapers are tolerated, then the problem reduces into the matter of washing the bottom floating in space and wrapping them with the diapers. Legs can probably be kept out of the way by some cushions.

[vessenes]

Definitely recommend you do a few days of market research before you start the robot design

[dmoy]

> washing the bottom

What about washing all the other places where baby's poop can get? (Legs, feet, hands, arms with some difficulty, all the way up the back, etc)

[eru]

Showerhead can still do that.

You can pretty much put water everywhere on a human body, as long as you make sure that they can still breath.

Legs and arms and the back etc are fairly trivial to clean with a showerhead. Skinfolds are where I would expect problems.

Btw, your system doesn't need to handle all corner cases of cleaning to be useful. It needs to not hurt anyone (in all cases); handle most common cases of cleaning; and ideally alert you when it can't clean some spots.

But even a system that can't alert you is still useful for a parent, because the parent can still look over the child afterwards.

[monknomo]

do you have any idea how many folds a baby has, and how much poop they can hide in them?

[eru]

I have a daughter and never had much trouble getting the poop off her.

But perhaps sons are worse?