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I have a tech support job that requires me to be paged (via sms) at various times in the night. I have a somewhat subtle ringtone that slowly increases in volume but I'm still concerned that it may wake my newborn child (who will be sleeping in the same room as me for at least the first month or two).
Are there other solutions for this?
Smart bands or smart watches as mentioned in the comments are an excellent method (as they can vibrate you awake).
Another option is to add white noise to the room to help keep the sound from bothering your newborn. A fan, for example, or a white noise generator (some alarm clocks serve this dual purpose!). This would make it more likely that the newborn not be as bothered by the sound.
Finally, you should likely be used to the fact that your newborn will wake up sometimes when you get up. You'll also find, though, that usually children will simply go back to sleep with a bit of soothing - and if they don't, they likely would've awoken anyway (needing feeding/changing/etc.).
Given that newborns need this sort of attention every few hours anyway, it may be worth working that into your wake up from tech support page routine: wake up, check if baby is wet, if baby won't immediately soothe get a bottle, etc. This may actually help your baby get a better night's sleep overall if you're being proactive about these kinds of issues.
In my experience, newborns wake up if they are hungry, but not always from 'normal' noises. If you have a subtle, not jarring ringtone, I would wait and see what happens.
Both of my children sleep through just about anything, and still do (once they actually do sleep...). When we had our second child, after 6 months we moved him to the same room as his brother. He was still waking once or twice at night, crying. His brother, used to random noises, slept like a rock. I think at this time it will take a Fire Alarm to wake them up :)
The more you can train your children to sleep through random noises the better. When mine were still napping, I didn't have to worry about loud music or lawn mowers or leaf blowers or similar.
Some of it is inborn, but I think you can get them more used to sleep through a little noise or alarm.
