Many societies have population-wide practices in place for monitoring children’s early development, particularly during the first years of life. These efforts require scalable measures of child development, which currently exist for monitoring children’s physical growth (WHO standards for weight and height), but not for collecting data on other aspects of early development (e.g. brain development and cognitive function). The current project developed a concept of a new, completely automated system for collecting data on infants’ brain and visual function through computerized measurement of infants’ eye movements.
Project activities were aimed at developing a prototype system, surveying end-user experiences and potential areas of utilization for the system, and identifying relevant intellectual property rights.
The concept was successfully turned into a low-cost and easy-to-use prototype of a system that captures and analyses data on infant eye movements during everyday screen viewing settings. The prototype was pilot tested with end users working with young infants. Pilot tests and interviews with health-care professionals identified four potential areas of utilization for the system in health care settings: 1) routine developmental check-ups (as a way of screening children requiring further assessment), 2) assessment of children in specialized care (for example, to assess whether problems at birth affect brain function and development), 3) evaluation of treatment protocols (e.g. effects of clinical routines on brain function and development), and 4) evaluation of health care prevention programs (e.g. effects of nutritional supplements on brain function). Agencies that provide recommendations for practices in many of these areas (e.g. WHO) have expressed interest in the utilization of novel technologies as indicators of early child development. Market and patent landscape analyses indicated that, while similar technologies are not yet marketed in any of the indicated areas of infant health care, utilization of systems that use eye movement measurements is, in part, restricted by existing patent applications or patents.
A Public-Private Partnership model was developed for further development of the concept and collection of relevant pilot data, for building awareness of the proposed method among end users and general public, and for identifying regulatory hurdles and potential barriers for wider utilization of the system as a new process-enabling service.
