When People magazine revealed last week that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West had hired a surrogate to carry their third child , it dominated headlines but shocked almost no one. After all, surrogacy is on the rise in the U.S.—one nonprofit group tracked 1,593 surrogate births in 2011 , up from 738 in 2004.

But what if there were a way to avoid the costly, ethically fraught, and often emotional process of involving a third person in the birthing process? Students from Artez Product Design Arnhem have come up with a provocative solution: Par-tu-ri-ent, an incubation system for bringing a child into the world completely outside the womb.

The Par-tu-ri-ent pod is an artificial and intelligent internet-connected incubator that could live in your family room. It has a clear curved lid so that eager parents can obsess over every stage of the fetus’s growth. To mimic the intimacy of carrying your own baby, there’s a portable care bag that slings over the shoulder and simulates the baby’s kicks. Likewise, when the parents gently rock the portable bag, the connected pod simulates the same movement to enhance the bonding experience.

There’s a feeding device that gets attached to the incubator as well, delivering just the right kinds of nutrients that have been freshly prepared and mushed up at home. And even a communication device, a microphone that mom or dad can use to coo soothing words, or pipe in those brain-stimulating Mozart sonatas, throughout the baby’s development.

The project, presented at this year’s Biodesign Challenge Summit, is intended to offer “a realistic impression of what the consequences of the progress of biotechnology and bio-design could be.” And while Par-tu-ri-ent tests the limits of our modern beliefs about pregnancy, the idea is both feasible and has merits.

First, the science: In vitro fertilization reached an all-time high in 2012, when 61,000 babies were conceived using the process. And just this past April, researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia successfully delivered baby lambs that had been gestated in a “biobag” filled with amniotic fluid. They hope to next test this process on humans, as a way to help premature babies grow to term. The lead surgeon on the project told Science that human testing could be three to five years away.