A Hereford student has helped design a baby's cot that can do almost anything.

Most of all he hopes that it will help reduce the dreaded sudden death syndrome.

Peter Lea and three fellow students at Coventry University were asked to design a product as their final fourth year project.

They decided on a baby's cot because they thought nothing much had happened to them in recent years and deserved to be reinvented.

They have called it the 'intelligent cot' for obvious reasons.

It can be linked to the modern home network systems and monitors the temperature within the cot, enables parents to both hear and see the baby from any room in the house, remotely rocks the baby to sleep, raises the mattress up and down to make it easier for parents to change the baby, and even makes life easier for mothers who have had a caesarean operation and find it difficult to bend or lift.

Peter, whose home is at Kings Acre, Hereford, agreed it may seem strange that a group of young men in their 20s should choose it as their project but they saw a real need for it.

Peter went to Whitecross High School and then took up a general engineering apprenticeship at Denco in Hereford before his four-year Industrial Product Design course at Coventry.

This is just coming to an end and now that a patent has been granted for the cot he hopes to be involved in its future promotion.

A lover of music and keen drummer, he has designed his own drum kit and when in Hereford hopes to be playing at Hereford Baptist Church.

"We recognised that many homes are now fitted with a home network system to control their lighting, heating and security and we thought it would be great to design a cot which can also be linked up to this,'' he said.