Most babies do a lot of crying, but how can parents tell if their cries are the result of everyday infant stressors like hunger and fatigue, or an indicator of a more serious problem? Researchers at Brown University have created a special "baby translating app" that will help doctors decode the often confusing cries of infants, Business Insider reports.
The crying analyzer app, not yet available to the general public, is the result of two years of diligent work between Brown University's Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems and the Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, designed to help allow doctors to analyze the subtle, "microscopic" differences in baby cries.
Since many of such differences are indiscernible to the human ear, the team of Brown and Rhode Island researchers created the new computer-based tool "to perform finely tuned acoustic analyses of babies' cries," according to a press release from Brown University. Details of the new analyzer will be published in a new paper describing the tool in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
"There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics," Stephen Sheinkopf, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown, who helped develop the new tool, said in Brown's press release. "For instance, babies with birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in pregnancy or birth or babies who are extremely premature can have ongoing medical effects. Cry analysis can be a noninvasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies."
The analyzer tool works in two phases. During the first phase, it separates a recorded baby's crying into 12.5-millisecond frames, each of which is then analyzed for parameters ranging from frequency characteristics to voicing and acoustic volume. In the next phase, the frames are put back together and "characterized either as an utterance - a single 'wah' - or silence, the pause between utterances. Longer utterances are separated from shorter ones and the time between utterances is recorded. Pitch, including the contour of pitch over time, and other variables can then be averaged across each utterance."
Barry Lester, director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk, explained that this new tool can act as a "window into the brain" of an infant.
"Cry is an early warning sign that can be used in the context of looking at the whole baby," Lester said. "Early detection of developmental disorders is critical. It can lead to insights into the causes of these disorders and interventions to prevent or reduce the severity of impairment."
