New Baby Cry Analyzer Could Help Understand Baby's Health

Having trouble figuring out why your newborn is crying? It can be frustrating to figure out the problem, so researchers from Brown University and the Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island created a tool to help determine why our infants get upset.

The tool may not help with daily problems but will serve as a method to detect health issues in babies by breaking down baby's cries into 12.5 millisecond frames that allows it to look at volume, characteristics, frequency and voicing, according to a press release from Brown University. 

The system evaluates for 80 different parameters in total, each of which that could give insight into a baby's health.  

Slight variations in cries, mostly unnoticeable to the human ear, can be a "window into the brain."

"It's a very 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. With the new cry analyzer, researchers believe it "will lead to new ways for researchers and clinicians to use cry in identifying children with neurological problems or developmental disorders."

Analyzing a baby's cry at an early age could help parents implement early intervention, which could help combat developmental disorders, according to researchers.

"There are a lot 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. "