Being a new parent is fulfilling but, at the same time, frazzling. It is, even more, frazzling when your newborn wails in the middle of the night, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of the commute home... Good thing technology has evolved to help you become a great parent to your bundle of joy.
There is an app for just about everything: from calling a cab to finding your true love, you can simply whip out your smartphone and get tapping. Naturally, for new mothers, there are apps that will help with caring for an infant. One to consider is "The Infant Cries Translator"
Deducing from the mobile app's name alone, this program can detect whether the crying of an infant is because he/she is hungry, sleepy, in pain, or has a wet diaper. The National Taiwan University Yunlin developed this nifty little app by collecting over 200,000 audio of crying babies over a two year period.
"The Infant Cries Translator" is very simple to use: the parent must record the sound of the crying baby using a smartphone and then run the audio on the app. The program, then, will compare the submitted audio to the hundreds of thousands of files in its database to determine whether the child is crying because he is hungry or in pain.
The researchers claim that the app is 92 percent accurate, reported Reuters. It also only needs 15 seconds of audio to determine the reason why the baby is crying.
"'The Infant Cries Translator' can differentiate four different statuses of sounds of baby crying including hunger, the diaper getting wet, sleepy, and pain," explained Chang Chuan-yu, lead researcher. "So far, according to feedback from users, the accuracy of the app we've tested can reach 92 percent for babies under two weeks old. As for babies one or two months, the accuracy of the app can also reach up to 84 to 85 percent. Even for the four-month-old baby, the accuracy can reach 77 per cent."
The researchers clarified that using the app to children aged six months old would be pointless because, by then. children's behavior will be affected by the environment. However, this can still be useful especially to new parents.
The app constantly updates its database via a Cloud Drive. And, because the program uses machine learning, results will improve and be personalized depending on the parents' response, according to Reuters.
"The Infant Cries Translator" is now available to Android and iOS users from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. The app retails for US$2.99.
