Monitor Your Cry Babies With This Parent-Friendly App

Keeping track of babies and toddlers can be the most hectic thing for parents. To ease the tough job of parenting, Taiwanese researchers have developed a new app which can help parents to differentiate their babies' cry in seconds.

Researchers at the National Taiwan University Hospital, Yunlin have developed Infant Cries Translator that can differentiate between four separate crying sounds by recording the sounds of babies and comparing them against a vast database.

‘An app called Infant Cries Translator can help distinguish between a variety of crying sounds made by babies.’

The study was led by Chang Chuan-yu and Dr Chen Si-da who collected around 200,000 crying sounds from approximately 100 new-born babies, and uploaded them to an online database. The analysis of the frequency of individual screams among these helped them to distinguish subtle differences in acoustics.

The app can analyze a baby's cries on the user's phone within 15 seconds. The app has an accuracy of 92 percent for infants under two weeks old.

"The Infant Cries Translator can differentiate four different statuses of sounds of baby crying, including hunger, the diaper getting wet, sleepy and pain. So far, according to the feedback from users, the accuracy of the app we've tested can reach 92 percent for babies under two weeks old. As for the babies under one or two months, the accuracy of the app can also reach up to 84 or 85 percent. Even for the four-month-old baby, the accuracy can reach 77 percent," said Chuan-yu.

The app constantly updates its database to a Cloud Drive. Its machine learning algorithm means that mothers and fathers can set up a personal setting for their infant, based on the parents' feedback. The app will be very useful for parents whose babies are below 6 months.

"After downloading this app, we only need to set the birth of date and nationality for the new born baby. Once the baby cries, we only need to press the recording button for 10 seconds, and the sound will be uploaded to the Cloud Drive. After the differentiating process, the analysis result of the sound would be transferred to Mum's mobile phone. So Mum can depend on the actual situation to determine whether the analysis result is correct or not, to make a revision for the app," said Chang.

Source: Medindia