A new computer-based tool can "hear" health and developmental problems in babies' crying.
Variations in the sounds of crying, undetectable for humans, offers a "window into the brain," for scientists, according to a Brown University press release.
"There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics," Stephen Sheinkopf, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown, said. "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 system separates a recording of a baby's cry into 12.5-millisecond-long frames. The software monitors the sound for "frequency characteristics, voicing, and acoustic volume." Then the frames are put back together and characterized as either crying or the pause in between, it also distinguishes between long and short utterances.
The system analyzes 80 different "parameters" overall.
"It's a comprehensive tool for getting as much important stuff out of a baby cry that we can," Harvey Silverman, professor of engineering and director of Brown's Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems, said.
Barry Lester, director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk said the idea for the tool comes from a 1960s disorder called Cri du chat (cry of the cat).
The disorder is similar to Down's syndrome; babies who suffer from it have an unmistakable high-pitched cry.
"Cry is an early warning sign that can be used in the context of looking at the whole baby," Lester said.
Sheinkopf hopes the tool will help medical professionals detect signs of autism early on.
"We've known for a long time that older individuals with autism produce sounds or vocalizations that are unusual or atypical," he said. "So vocalizations in babies have been discussed as being useful in developing early identification tools for autism. That's been a major challenge. How do you find signs of autism in infancy?"
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