Newborns and young infants cry because that is the only way they know how to communicate. Its how they let us know that they need or want something. The tough part for parents is figuring out what that “something” is, however. As parents spend time with their newborns, their parental instincts kick-in and they become better at deciphering their baby’s cries. But, a group of students and their advisers at UCLA have developed a tool to help parents understand why their baby is crying from the very beginning.

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ChatterBaby is a smartphone app designed to transmit a baby’s cry into a database that will determine whether a baby is hungry, tired, in pain, or bored. It does this by analyzing how long the cry lasts without pausing and how energetic the cry is. The team has developed an algorithm to help “predict” each cry and they have a 90% accuracy rate. This app will not stop a baby from crying, but it will certainly help parents from guessing what their baby could need.

The project was first “intended to alert deaf parents that their children are crying”, but the team quickly saw how all parents could benefit from it. Research coordinator and fourth-year student on the project, Bianca Dang, explained that they “want both parents, not just the mother, to be able to interact with their baby better and more effectively." If one parent is staying at home with the baby all day, then that parent will learn to understand their baby’s cry faster than the other who works away from home. This can be frustrating to that parent because they would like to help, but feel like they do not know how.

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Dang also went on to explain that the cries kept in the app’s database could be used to help detect “genetic anomalies,” such as autism, from an early age. Most children are not diagnosed on the autism spectrum until they are three-years old. But, if parents could know if their child has autism tendencies at an earlier age, they could intervene much sooner and hopefully cause less stress later on. Dang said that “it’s too early” to call the app a “diagnostic tool” for autism, but with more research and time the app can prove to be helpful.

ChatterBaby is available to the public through Google Play and the App Store. Since the group is continuously doing research, they encourage parents to send any audio of their baby crying in order to keep improving their algorithms. Any personal or identifying information is taken away from the audio and the cries remain anonymous.

Sources: DailyBruinChatterBaby