Science Medical student develops app to decipher infant cries

A medical student is leading a team to improve an app that uses artificial intelligence to understand what babies are crying about. Nakai Koga, a sixth-year student at Tokushima University, became interested in baby cries three years ago after talking to mothers who had postpartum depression. Nakai, who wanted to be an orthopaedic surgeon then, learned that these mothers used to find their babies' cries cute. But after hearing their babies cry every day, they started to get annoyed and frustrated because they didn't know why their children were crying.

They worried about what others thought of them when their babies wouldn't stop crying. Nakai also read an article that said 14.3 percent of around 100,000 Japanese women surveyed suffered from postpartum depression one month after childbirth. He volunteered to work at a day care center, where he interviewed 523 parents and other guardians. Knowing that crying is the babies' tool of communication, Nakai believed that fewer parents would feel troubled by child care if they didn't feel annoyed by the crying. He felt that AI could determine why babies cry based on the volume, frequency and other particulars.

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Nakai enlisted the help of medical institutions and daycare centres to collect recordings of babies' cries, and he used an AI system that he developed to analyze more than 12,000 clips of voice data. He founded Cross Medicine Inc. in September 2022. The following year, he released a preliminary edition of Awababy Pro, an app that shows pictorially why a baby is crying when the cry is recorded on a smartphone. It takes the app about six seconds to classify babies' feelings into five patterns, including "drowsy," "in a bad mood" and "hungry," based on the frequencies and volumes of their cries. The app can also show how the parent can stop the crying, such as by caressing, hugging, or giving the baby milk.

¥10 says one of the unmentioned things a baby is communicating, is "change my diaper".