New analyzer can determine health problem in babies based on their cry

How many babies have you heard cry? How many of those times did you know exactly what that baby wanted based on the type of cry? Thousands of parents have only dreamed of such a thing. Researchers and doctors may soon have technology to do so as a team from Brown University and the Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island have created a device that meant exactly for this purpose.

These workers have developed a computer-based device that can analyze a baby's cry and interpret milliseconds of the recorded sounds to decipher out possible health problems or developmental conditions.

According to according to Counsel & Heal, the director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk, Barry Lester, explained that, "Cry is an early warning sign that can be used in the context of looking at the whole baby. The idea is that cry can be a window into the brain. 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."

While most parents associate their child’s cry with its immediate needs of food, sleep, warmth, and comfort, deeper analysis of the cry can indicate much more.

After two years of working, developers were able to create the analyzer by researching the different lengths, pitches, and other acoustic elements of babies’ cries and their connections to disorders, according to < a href=http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/263310.phphttp://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/263310.php>Medical News Today. Research on the matter has been ongoing since the 1960s with the development of the disorder Cri du Cat - cry of the cat – syndrome, where the most notable symptom is a piercingly high-pitched wail. It is now, though that the fully functional device has been created.

Using 80 different metrics to connect the cry of a baby to its health condition, the analyzer has two phases in its process. First, it records the cries and filters them into 12.5 millisecond pieces, and the parameters are tested for their specific frequencies, voicing, and acoustic volumes. Second, the device recombines the frames without the uninformative parameters and studied as a whole. The lengths of the utterances, or pauses, between each frame is measured as well and scrutinized for its pitch too.

Stephen Sheinkopf, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown, helped to develop the analyzer.

Sheinkopf discussed the device, saying, "There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics. For instance, babies with birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in pregnancy, or birth of 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."

With this new device, doctors will be aided in their diagnosis, and researchers will have additional clues into the work being don on infant cry development.