Researchers from UCLA have designed an app that will alert hearing-impaired parents to when and why their child is crying.

Designed by a team led by Ariana Anderson, assistant professor in residence of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the app is called Chatterbaby, and it uses artificial intelligence to determine why a baby is crying.

“I realized that the cries of my third baby were remarkably similar to the cries of the first two,” said Anderson, who is also a statistician in the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “As a mother, you instinctively know what your child is trying to tell you simply by listening to how they cry, even if you can’t see them. As a statistician, I thought, ‘Can we train an algorithm to do what my ears as a parent can do automatically?’ The answer was yes.”

The research team designed the app by first uploading over 2,000 samples of babies crying. Later, the team developed algorithms that would group the cries into one of three categories -- hunger, fussiness and pain. In 90 percent of the tests, the algorithms correctly identified the type of cry (i.e., pain associated with a vaccination, for instance).

Currently available for free on Android and iPhone devices as well as at Chatterbaby.org, parents can upload recordings of their babies’ cries to the app and they can be analyzed via AI.

The research team believes that the app will prove useful to new parents as well as hearing-impaired parents, as most new parents aren’t entirely familiar with the different cries of a newborn baby.

“The program looks at the types of frequencies that are in the cry and at the different patterns of sounds and silence,” Anderson said. “For example, when you hear a cry that has a long period of silence in it, it’s more likely that the baby is fussy. But when babies are in pain, the cries typically have louder, longer bursts and there’s very little silence between sounds.”

“This study is unique because it brings the lab to the participant instead of the participant to the lab,” Anderson says. “It’s open to anyone willing to download the Chatterbaby app on their iPhone or Android devices, record five seconds of their baby’s cries, then upload it to the database.”