A machine that tells you why your baby is crying

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The cry of a baby could be a crucial factor in pinpointing health problems that may remain undetected, new research suggests.
 
To parents, a baby’s cry is a signal of hun-ger, pain, or discomfort. But to scientists, the subtle acoustic features of a cry can hold important information about a baby’s health.
 
Now researchers have developed a new computer-based tool to analyse babies’ cries.
 
The team hopes their baby cry analyser will offer a new way to identify children with neurological problems or developmental disorders or in detecting autism in infants.
 
“There are lots of conditions that may manif-est in differences in cry acoustics,” said Dr Ste-phen Sheinkopf from Brown University. The team also comprised researchers from Wom-en and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, US.
 
The system operates in two phases. In the fir-st, the analyser separa-tes recorded cries into 12.5-millisecond fram-es. Each frame is analy-sed for several parameters. The second phase uses data from the first to give a broader view of the cry. The frames are put together and characterised either as an utterance — a single “wah” — or silence.