Welcome!
The LittleBeats Projects are being conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by Dr. Nancy McElwain (Department of Human Development and Family Studies; Director of the Interdisciplinary Lab for Social Development) in collaboration with Drs. Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Romit Roy Choudhury (Electrical and Computer Engineering).
For these projects, your child will wear a new mobile sensing device (called LittleBeats™) in the home. This form of research is a new and exciting way for parents to become researchers in their own homes! The tasks involved in our projects (e.g., watching a brief video and play) give parents an opportunity to spend one-on-one time with their child.
Thanks to the Beckman Institute for housing our grants and providing a place for us to collaborate with researchers from different departments all over campus! The Beckman Institute makes some of the world’s most cutting-edge work in science and technology possible.
Our LittleBeats projects are supported by funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R34-DA050256), National Institute of Mental Health (R21-MH112578), National Institute of Food and Agriculture (ILLU-793-368), Illinois Center for Social and Behavioral Science, and Illinois Jump ARCHES (UI Award#104334). We are also immensely grateful to the families who have participated in our LittleBeats projects.