BabyCloud, a Technological Platform for Parents and Researchers

Abstract

In this paper, we present BabyCloud, a platform for capturing, storing and analyzing daylong audio recordings and photographs of children's linguistic environments, for the purpose of studying infant's cognitive and linguistic development and interactions with the environment. The proposed platform connects two communities of users: families and academics, with strong innovation potential for each type of users. For families, the platform offers a novel functionality: the ability for parents to follow the development of their child on a daily basis through language and cognitive metrics (growth curves in number of words, verbal complexity, social skills, etc). For academic research, the platform provides a novel means for studying language and cognitive development at an unprecedented scale and level of detail. They will submit algorithms to the secure server which will only output anonymized aggregate statistics. Ultimately, {BabyCloud aims at creating an ecosystem of third parties (public and private research labs...) gravitating around developmental data, entirely controlled by the party whose data originate from, i.e. families.

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