In Japan, babytech helps parents better understand their baby’s cries

More and more companies are launching technological tools to help young couples welcome their first child.

In Japan, tech is coming to the aid of babies. This September, you can now record your baby’s cries on your smartphone and use artificial intelligence to understand the reason for their discontent. It’s a bit like a baby cry translator. A team of former students from Tokushima University of Medicine has launched the awababy pro app. During their studies, some of them worked with children and young parents, either in hospitals or in daycare centers. They were struck by the distress of moms and dads. Parents talk a lot about their frustration with these cries that they don’t understand. They have collected thousands of recordings of babies crying.

Each time, she recorded the different cries of the same baby, because babies do not always use the same cry to express their discomfort. They entered these sound files into their computers to identify different frequencies. Is it a very short cry that comes back quickly? Or rather long sobs at a slower pace? By questioning the parents, they made a link between each of these cries and the solution used, each time, to try to calm them.

With the computing power of artificial intelligence, they then created an algorithm that can quickly recognize these cries. They currently distinguish six types of cries: either the baby is signaling that he is hungry, or he is trying to say that he wants to sleep, or that he has a stomach ache. At home, you place your smartphone next to your crying baby. The application listens to him for six seconds and tells you the most likely reason why he is crying. It even suggests solutions to calm him down quickly: a cuddle, a little milk or a little nap.

This baby tech is widely used. Technical solutions are starting to become popular. Awa baby is also releasing a new version of its application in a month. This time, it will be able to give even more details on the nature of the baby’s cries. Other similar tools are also developing on the Japanese market. You can also buy here a kind of small speaker that also listens to your baby crying and translates the nature of his cries live. This company called “ainene” also listens to your baby while he sleeps to determine his perfect sleep rhythm. It tells you when to wake him up or when it is time to go back to bed. This company assures that its analyses, which are also based on artificial intelligence, are correct in 80% of cases.