It’s great to be pregnant in the digital age. From sharing a baby’s heartbeat on social media to tracking contractions digitally, expecting parents can connect with their unborn babies through a variety of methods. Innovative tech gadgets help parents and even siblings connect with the baby before the due date.

Here are six ways tech items and apps can help you bond with your baby bump. Spend time researching these gadgets to see if they’re right for you, and ensure you have a good internet connection to make using these items as easy as possible.

First Trimester

1. Listen to Baby’s Heartbeat

Hearing a baby’s heartbeat is a parent’s first connection with their new little one. And today’s technology doesn’t limit listening to the baby’s heart to prenatal appointments.

Slide the Bellabeat Shell over your phone, connect it to the Shell app, place it against your belly, and listen to the baby’s heartbeat with your partner. With similar technology, Kaishi uses a simple fetal heart rate monitor which synchs to a smartphone app and amplifies your baby’s heartbeat. You can then share the heartbeat on social media.

2. Document Pregnancy Updates

Parents can use various apps to keep a journal of regular pregnancy updates. Most tools also offer instructional material to track baby’s development and help you look up basic medical questions.

Ovia allows you to enter pregnancy information like milestones, doctors notes, and nutrition. Ovia includes a popular growth feature that shows the actual size of the baby’s hand every week. Bumpfie is another unique app that uses a BumpCam to take daily photos of your growing belly, and then using stop-motion technology, turns those photos into a video.

Second Trimester

3. Play Utero Tunes

At sixteen weeks, your baby starts detecting sounds—by twenty-four weeks, they can recognize voices. Playing your baby music is a unique bonding activity, and with the right tunes, it can help you relax, too.

Long gone are the days when parents would stick Walkman headphones on the belly. Parents can use new products like the Lullabelly Prenatal Music Belt that pipes music around the belly, or BellyBuds speakers that attach to the belly with reusable medical tape.

4. Monitor Kicks

Kicks in your belly are your baby’s earliest form of communication, and you can bond with your baby by gently poking back or rubbing the spot where the baby kicked. And today, you can digitally track your baby’s kicks and share the joy with others.

For example, you and your partner can wear the Libero BabyBuzz bracelet set. You hit a button on your Bluetooth-enabled bracelet every time the baby kicks, and that button vibrates your partner’s bracelet based off the intensity of the baby’s movement.

Third Trimester

5. Play Peek-a-Boo with a Flashlight

A flashlight is one of the most affordable and easiest-to-use pieces of tech that can help parents bond with their baby. Though a developing baby’s eyelids actually stay closed until twenty-six weeks, babies see light in the uterus the same way we do through our closed eyelids. A fun trick (especially for siblings to try) is to shine a flashlight on the belly, then feel and watch the baby either move away or towards the light.

Any light will work, though a strobing flashlight with different light and color patterns produces fun effects.

6. Track Movements and Contractions

During the final stage of pregnancy, you ideally want to feel your baby kick ten times every two hours, which can help prevent stillbirth by letting you notice any potential issues. Now, though, there are devices that will count your baby’s kicks for you.

The affordable Kicktrack is a handheld gadget you push every time you feel the baby moving, and the device tracks kicks and times contractions in an electronic log. For those who don’t want to push a button, Bloomlife is a wearable sensor that attaches to the belly and automatically tracks kicks and measures length of contractions in the companion app.

Those nine months of pregnancy can feel like an eternity when you’re anxiously waiting to meet your new baby. But bonding with your bump makes the experience much sweeter. Explore these tech items and learn more about which ones work best for your needs and desires.