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

Automated Assessment of Neurodevelopment in Infants at Risk for Motor Disability

Early childhood detection of motor delays or impairments provides the opportunity for early treatment which improves health outcomes. This study will use state of the art sensors combined with machine learning algorithms to develop objective, accurate, easy-to-use tools for the early scoring of deficits and lays the foundation for the early prediction of physical 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.

Infants, male and female, between 0-6 months (Infants older than 6 months before initial enrollment will be excluded).

• Infants with early brain injury (EBI):

  • Hydrocephalus
  • Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE)
  • Periventricular leukomalacia (PVL)
  • Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH)
  • Stroke

• Healthy infants (controls):

  o No history of early brain injury (EBI)

• Infants without EBI/risk for future disability:

  • Infants without known brain injuries, but with a history of preterm birth less than 32-week gestation with significant medical problems, difficulty eating, or who lack head control at 4 months of age or later will be classified as moderate risk.