I don't have a baby, so I tested a smart baby monitor by watching my pet hedgehog all night - here's what I discovered

Mary Meisenzahl/Business Insider

I tested out a smart baby monitor on my hedgehog, Lola. Here she is after a bath.

• Smart baby monitors are increasingly becoming a must-have item for parents of young children.
• I, however, do not have any children, so I usually disregard pitches I get claiming that some monitor is disrupting the industry.
• But I realized after a while I do have a use for a smart baby monitor: my pet hedgehog, Lola, is nocturnal. I decided to try the Summer Baby Pixel Zoom HD 5-inch Video Monitor to see if it worked for pet-tracking.
• It was a great way to keep an eye on her at night, when she's most active. 
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Not long after starting at Business Insider, I noticed that I was getting a weirdly high number of pitches about covering baby monitors. Did I accidentally get put on the wrong list? Were they confusing me with someone else? I don't know, but I thought I knew of at least one use for a baby monitor, if my editors would go for it.

My hedgehog, Lola, is like a baby in the sense that she is often cranky, and we maintain different sleep schedules. I don't strictly need to have a camera trained on her at night, but it had a strong possibility of being cute, so I went for it.

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Hedgehogs are nocturnal, so I wanted a baby monitor capable of taking high-quality images in low light. This is especially important because Lola won't really wake up and do all her nighttime activities until it's almost pitch-black in my room. Once it is dark enough for her, she gets up almost immediately. Most nights, I close my curtains and turn off the lights, and hear her crunching on her food within minutes. Then, the rest of the night she alternates between running on her wheel (a hilarious sight), eating, drinking, and sleeping - the good life, basically.

It's surprisingly hard to get look at Lola on her wheel - as soon as there's even a little bit of light, or she hears you come by her cage, she freezes or runs to hide in her igloo.

To keep an eye on Lola at night, I requested a review model of the Summer Baby Pixel Zoom HD, and mounted it to the side of her cage. This model comes with some pretty cool features that I was excited to try: 

• Remote steering, up to 300 degrees left and right and 125 degrees up and down
• SleepZone virtual boundary - you can set a boundary around a certain area and get an alert if your baby (hedgehog) moves outside the area
• Two-way talk back and lullabies, meaning I can start talking to her and watch her freeze on her wheel
• Moonlite night vision, which can temporarily illuminate the camera.

Here are the results.