Look who’s talking now.
One of the most stressful aspects of being a new parent is being subjugated to your baby’s crying and then finding yourself unable to figure out what the problem is. That all may be in the past though. Researchers in Taiwan have developed an app that may make it easier for parents to calm and provide for their crying babies.
The app, called Infant Cries Translator, tries to identify the baby’s needs based on its crying. The app references a thorough database of possible crying sounds, looking for small changes in the acoustics and frequency of the individual screams. Built over two years, this database contains over 200,000 crying sounds collected from 100 infants.
The app receives a soundbite of your baby’s cry, and returns its analysis within 15 seconds. According to IBN Live the app updates its database to a Cloud Drive on a constant basis. The algorithm of the app allows parents to modify the settings according to their infant.
According to a video put out by Reuters courtesy of Chang Chuan-Yu and Dr. Chen Si-da the Infant Cries Translator can differentiate four different statuses of sounds of a 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.” The creators say there is a little point past the age of six months because the baby has become more adapted to its environment.
Although it’s not yet perfect, the next generations of these apps may become an everyday sight with new parents, especially those unaccustomed to caring for an upset infant.
