What Do Infant Cries Reveal? A Crowdsourcing Experiment

Infant crying is a key form of early communication, yet its developmental significance remains poorly understood due to limited data and inadequate analytical methods. This project pioneers a large-scale crowdsourcing approach to infant cry research by deploying custom firmware on commercially available baby monitors. Participating parents receive feedback on their child’s crying patterns in exchange for data, enabling automated collection and segmentation of infant cries in natural environments. The project addresses two major limitations in the field: the lack of high-quality, scalable datasets and the unsuitability of existing audio representations for cry analysis. Using the collected data, we will develop a novel, neuro-inspired signal processing technique to explore whether infant cries encode developmental information.