PANDA Gym: Automated Assessment of Neurodevelopment in Infants at Risk for Motor Disability

For children with neurodevelopmental disabilities, early treatment in the first year of life improves long-term outcomes. However, the investigators are currently held back by inadequacies of available clinical tests to measure and predict impairment. Existing tests are hard to administer, require specialized training, and have limited long-term predictive value. There is a critical need to develop an objective, accurate, easy-to-use tool for the early prediction of long-term physical disability. The field of pediatrics and infant development would greatly benefit from a quantitative score that would correlate with existing clinical measures used today to detect movement impairments in very young infants. To realize a new generation of tests that will be easy to administer, the investigators will obtain large datasets of infants playing in an instrumented gym or simply being recorded while moving in a supine posture. Video and sensor data analyses will convert movement into feature vectors based on our knowledge of the problem domain. Our approach will use machine learning to relate these feature vectors to currently recommended clinical tests or other ground truth information. The power of this design is that algorithms can utilize many aspects of movement to produce the relevant scores.