It is clear that it is not so important to know the reasons why a baby cries, how to try to calm him immediately with all our weapons: our voice, our hugs, caresses ...
But it would be perfect if we could also distinguish what bothers you to solve it as soon as possible, especially in the case of first-time parents with a newborn. At least I would have liked to have him when my oldest daughter was born!
And Ana Laguna Pradas, Master in Artificial Intelligence, thought the same when she became pregnant with her son. So he decided to create an algorithm that identifies the different cries of your baby. And, he assured us in an interview, that it works.
In Babies and more An investigation shows why the crying baby should always be taken care ofA project that started as a hobby
Ana Laguna, in a photo courtesy of her Few mothers can be so professionally prepared to develop an app to differentiate the cries of a baby, such as Ana Laguna.
This data scientist at BBVA Data & Analytics, explains that she began to cherish the idea of developing the app when she became pregnant in 2016, thinking if she would be able to guess the needs of her son only with her crying.
"I looked for an existing application and only found one Chinese, which also worked poorly and that does not work for the Spaniards, since the children cry differently according to their language. So when my son is born I start recording his cries and start frigating with the idea during my son's naps. At first, just as a hobby. "
He explains that the idea was not so far-fetched, since he had previously worked on machine translation and "If we strive to understand chimpanzees or identify the sound of whales, for example, why not create an algorithm that helps us understand our children."
And he adds that:
"Artificial intelligence may seem like a crazy fashion, but its use will be increasingly common and normal over the years."
What is it based on?
Ana Laguna says that she began recording her son's cries when she turned a month old, "when he began to distinguish what happened to him according to his way of crying".
Because as he explains, the algorithm needs an audio and a labeling (that is, hunger, sleep, pain ...) so that when he hears that audio he understands why he cries.
For us to understand each other: "It works like the human brain, based on repetitions. And the same with the sound, he recognizes it because he has heard it many times."
Audio signals of cries for hunger, discomfort and sleep, recorded by Ana Laguna He adds that he continued recording his baby's cry until he was four months old, because:
"The baby from zero to six months cries for primary needs, while halfway through the year, incorporates other reasons more pillars': by pampering, to be caught in the arm ... and my intention was and is to identify the first, the most basic ".
He got to record 65 audios, a number that admits that he falls short to create an algorithm of these characteristics. And that also implies a very important bias: "I only have data on my son and I need to incorporate other babies' audios."
He acknowledges that he kept the investigations in a drawer and that he has now decided to take it back to create "A mobile application that knows that it will be 'useful especially for first-time parents and those who suffer from hearing problems, since the algorithm works well, distinguishes audio changes."
Different spectrogram images, according to two causes of crying, of Ana Laguna's research Therefore, in order to complete the project and make the algorithm even more powerful and able to identify as many causes of crying as possible, Ana Laguna has decided to start an NGO with a 'Donation of crying' campaign to collect audios from other babies
If you have a baby under six months and the idea seems interesting to you, you can also participate in the project by contributing the cries of your little one to the NGO 'So Good Data'.
This is how a similar app works
Although when Ana Laguna started with the idea of creating an app that interpreted crying, only China existed, in the past two years a similar application has appeared in the United States, created by a Californian team led by Ariana Anderson, computational neuropsychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
It is called Chatterbaby and is available for Android and iPhone, although according to the Spanish scientist It has limitations and does not work for Spain:
"The algorithm is elaborated with international data, a problem if we take into account that each child cries differently according to his language. It is necessary to work with specific audios of the language, in our case, in Spanish."
In Babies and moreThe language of crying: why doesn't an Asian baby cry like a European baby Laguna recognizes the great work of the American university, with a database that includes thousands of examples, and that is capable of identifying pain with 90% success, but "It still falls short of other variables such as hunger. It predicts it in 60 percent of cases when the random is in 50 percent.".
So, we will have to wait for Ana Laguna to achieve its goal by being able to work with a database as large as the US, but in Spanish. And, he confesses, it seems that he is on the right track, because online donations of baby cries in his NGO do not stop growing.
While the time comes, I am sure that all mothers continue to respond to the needs of our babies, testing all possible causes at first, until we learn to distinguish why we cry and we are right.
Photos | iStock
