Suboptimal nutrition and poverty during early childhood are serious risk factors for early development. In addition to affecting physical growth, early environmental adversities may lead to a compromised neurological development, which in turn may readily cascade into lifelong effects in cognitive, emotional, and social performance. Recent estimates suggest that even one third of the world’s children fail to attain their full developmental potential, due to nutritional or other environmental deficiencies in their living environment.
Improving this situation is by and large impeded by the lack of means for neurodevelopmental assessment that would be reliable, objective, scalable, efficient, and culture-insensitive. Such method(s) are lacking, but they could be very helpful as outcome measures in the development of interventions, especially in low-resource settings. Use of movement sensors is common in other wellness and health applications. However, wearables of this kind have not been used before for infant’s neuromotor assessment. We aim to address this by testing an innovative sensory wearable to assess for infant’s neuromotor development.
In our study, the main broad objective is to assess the feasibility and acceptability of a novel wearable method to study early motor development among young infants in rural Malawi.
The following are the specific objectives:
- To examine the psychosocial acceptance of the technical clothing by infants and their mothers.
- To test the utility and technical challenges with mobile phone-based and internet-dependent recording method.
- To map construct gross motor growth charts for the development of different postures and movements.
- To determine the accuracy of motor age prediction from the wearable data.
- To identify universal and culture-context dependent patterns in early motor development by comparing results between Malawian and Finnish children.
The study will be implemented in collaboration with Global Health Group at Tampere University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, School of Global and Public Health, Malawi University of Health Sciences and Children’s Hospital, University of Helsinki, Finland.