Health

    Health & New Tech

    Mental Health & Neurology

Mécénat des Mutuelles

France

Baby Crying : a Tool to Assess Neurodevelopmental Risk

Although part of the daily lives of millions of humans, babies' crying remains poorly understood. The information encoded in the cries allows the baby's caregivers to adapt their response to the baby's demands. However, deciphering and interpreting newborns' cries remains a real challenge for many parents as well as for perinatal professionals. A particular challenge is to identify through crying risks or pathological problems that the baby is facing.  

Does the crying of a newborn make it possible to assess a future neurological risk at an early stage? 

The project led by Nicolas Mathevon will explore this question through innovative acoustic analysis and artificial intelligence methods to explore a large bank of recordings of crying babies, born at term and premature, associated with physiological and developmental data. 

In this project, the cries of a thousand babies will be recorded, creating a bankwill be unique in the world by its size, reliability, and the information associated with sound recordings. They will then be analysed using artificial intelligence methods and the teams will study whether they can identify developmental difficulties such as autism spectrum and interaction disorders, language delays, or the sequelae of early neonatal brain damage (anoxic encephalopathy, convulsions). 

The ultimate goal is to offer a new non-invasive screening tool that is easy to implement in a hospital setting. This project also has a strong educational dimension and aims to disseminate scientifically established knowledge about babies' crying in order to prevent the associated risks, in particular with the publication of a book and a website: Understanding your baby 

Nicolas
MATHEVON

Institution

Université Jean Monnet - Saint Etienne

Country

France

Nationality

French

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