Ural doctors and scientists are working on a beta version of a child development tracker. The app will help parents keep track of how much the mental, speech and motor development level of their baby is appropriate for the age.

Also, moms and dads will be able to receive personal recommendations on games and interaction with their offspring, taking into account his individual characteristics.

A whole team of specialists is working on the project – from the Ural Federal University, the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Ural State Medical University, and the City Perinatal Center. The first stage of the project is the creation of a website where a parent can fill out a checklist of the child’s basic skills; find out what you need to pay attention to and which signs will tell you to go to the doctor. And if there is no neurologist in the village, the application will allow you to receive the necessary data remotely and send it to the doctor.

The scientists will not stop there. In the future, the application will be equipped with a system for automatic recognition of movement disorders in babies. The system is based on artificial intelligence and computer vision technologies. To assess the development, you will need to shoot a five-minute video on a smartphone.

“The idea of the project was formed in the course of research in the field of early neurocognitive development of children,” says Ksenia Kunnikova, project manager and employee of USMU. “For six years we have worked in a research laboratory and studied the developmental characteristics of children from five months to three years.

According to her, every day young parents came to the laboratory and complained about the feeling of confusion due to the huge amount of chaotic and often inaccurate information from the Internet. They wanted to know what needs to be done for the correct development of the baby.

– We noticed that parents would like to have a convenient and accessible tool for assessing the health of their child. This is how the idea of creating an online platform on which moms and dads can track the emergence of new skills arose, – says the author of the project, a researcher at the laboratory of the brain and neurocognitive development of the UrFU Yekaterina Suleimanova.

Experts are sure: the sooner it is possible to identify the pathology in a child, the more opportunities there will be for treatment and successful rehabilitation. The project has no analogues in Russia. Testing of the beta version will begin at the end of August this year, the application is planned to be launched in the fall.

Source: Rossiyskaya Gazeta