The cry of a baby could be a crucial factor in pinpointing health problems, a new research suggests.To parents, a baby’s cry is a signal of hunger, pain, or discomfort. But to scientists, the subtle acoustic features of a cry can hold important information about a baby’s health.A team of researchers from Brown University and Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island in the US has 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.They believe it could even be a way of detecting autism in infants.“There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics,” said Dr Stephen Sheinkopf, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown. “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. Cry analysis can be a non-invasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioural systems in infants.”The system operates in two phases. During the first phase, the analyser separates recorded cries into 12.5-millisecond frames. Each frame is analysed for several parameters, including frequency characteristics, voicing, and acoustic volume.The second phase uses data from the first to give a broader view of the cry and reduces the number of parameters to those that are useful.The frames are put back together and characterised either as an utterance–a single ‘wah’–or silence, the pause between utterances. Longer utterances are separated from shorter ones and the time between utterances is recorded. Pitch, including the contour of pitch over time, and other variables can then be averaged across each utterance.In the end, the system evaluates for 80 different parameters, each of which could hold clues about a baby’s health.“The idea is that cry can be a window into the brain,” Barry Lester, director of Brown’s Centre for the Study of Children at Risk, said.Dr Sheinkopf, who specialises in developmental disorders, plans to use the tool to look for cry features that might correlate with autism.“We’ve known for long that older individuals with autism produce sounds or vocalisations that are unusual or atypical,” Dr Sheinkopf said.“So vocalisations in babies have been discussed as being useful in developing early identification tools for autism. That’s been a major challenge. How do you find signs of autism in infancy? The answer could be encoded in a cry.”
