Participation typically lasts 2-3 weeks, although this can vary depending on your availability and timeline for completing the home recordings.

In appreciation of their time, families who complete all study parts will receive $190 in Amazon e-gift cards and a personalized baby book!

Overall, parents and children tend to enjoy participating in research of this kind because it gives parents an opportunity to play with their child and learn more about their child’s development. Furthermore, the knowledge we gain from this research will allow us to offer recommendations to families and childcare professionals that will benefit young children.

Of course! We aim to learn about children’s development in their natural environments, including the interactions they have with parents and siblings. We encourage you to speak with your family members about the study before signing up for participation.  Any adults in the home will be asked to sign a consent form before beginning recording.

You will need a device with a camera and microphone. It is also ideal if the virtual visit happens in a quiet environment with minimal distractions, but we understand this is not always possible. We’d also like your child to be seated in either a bouncy seat or high chair for part of the visit, but if you don’t have either of those, there are ways we can work around that. Finally, during the play session, we’ll ask you to have a few toys ready that you can use to play with your child.

For this project, we will not be looking at individual results; rather, we will be evaluating at a group level. To stay up-to-date with our future publications, please visit our website. If you would like a copy of the publications, please send us a message to ui-littlebeats@illinois.edu to be added to our mailing list.

The best way to ensure that the device is recording is to 1) check that LittleBeats™ is turned off when it is not in use, 2) charge LittleBeats™ overnight before each day of recording, and 3) check that a red blinking light appears on the back of LittleBeats™ when you first turn on LittleBeats™ to begin a recording. This red light indicates that the device is on and recording. If you notice that the red light has stopped blinking when you go to turn off LittleBeats™, please make a note of this in your daily diary.

LittleBeats™ can be worn during your regular routines, including while running errands, taking a walk, or at the park. We encourage you to use LittleBeats™ while going about your regular routines but remind you that you are free to power off or take off LittleBeats™ at any time. If you are with anyone outside of your family for an extended amount of time, we ask that you turn the device off.

Yes. In general, though, we want recordings during your child’s full day (about 8-10 hours).

We would be happy to have your child wear LittleBeats™ during nap time. However, we remind you that you are free to remove LittleBeats™ at any time and ask that your child only wear LittleBeats™ at times that you are comfortable with them wearing the device.

Before recording during the day, please charge the LittleBeats™ device overnight using the charger provided in your kit.  The LittleBeats™ is charging when a solid orange light illuminates on the back of the device. When the device is fully charged, the orange light will no longer illuminate.

Yes, your child is welcome to wear clothes on top of the LittleBeats™ shirt.

Yes, you are welcome to wash them once the device and ECG wires have been removed!

Please remove LittleBeats™ before putting your child in a car seat. You can completely remove LittleBeats™ and the ECG stickers, or at a minimum, take LittleBeats™ out of the shirt pocket while leaving the ECG stickers and wires attached.

LittleBeats™ is placed inside of a specially designed shirt pocket on the front of the shirt. To collect heart rate data, three ECG leads and stickers are placed on the chest and lower ribs.

Both adult and child participants have noted that after setting LittleBeats™ up, they feel comfortable going about their day and forget LittleBeats™ is there!

We would be happy to have your child wear LittleBeats™ during nap time. However, we remind you that you are free to remove  LittleBeats™ at any time and ask that your child only wear LittleBeats™ at times that you are comfortable with them wearing the device.

We provide a specially designed t-shirt with a front pocket to hold the device that will hide the device. Also, the device itself is sleek and light.

The device is encased and protected, so that is completely fine! As long as they seem comfortable.

No, we will walk you through how to put the device on your child on your own.

If this happens, please dispose of the old sticker, replace it with a NEW sticker, and make a note of it in your Daily Diary.

LittleBeats™ is designed to be used in natural settings (e.g., the home, playgrounds, etc.) with minimal interruptions and where researchers are not present.

Furthermore, LittleBeats™ collects three streams of data at the same time: heart rate, motion, and audio.

LittleBeats™ simultaneously collects motion, heart rate, and audio data.

Yes! LittleBeats™ is very safe, does not interfere with movement, and does not require any invasive procedures beyond placing gel stickers on the skin near the neck and lower ribs. LittleBeats™ is for research purposes only and therefore is not FDA-approved. LittleBeats™ should not be used for medical diagnoses.

In this project, we aim to develop methods that allow infant studies to be conducted in the comfort of a family’s home. The methods under development will also help researchers, healthcare providers, and parents better understand infant development, such as how babies communicate their needs and feelings with caregivers.

The “quiet time” session will give us your child’s heart rate at rest, the “still face” session will help us observe how they respond to changes in emotion, and the play session will help us assess how they explore their environment. Additionally, the LittleBeats™ data will give us rich information about your child’s everyday experiences. We will ask how our LittleBeats™ data relate to data we collect through more standardized virtual visit tasks and parent questionnaires. We include infants from 3-10 months old to learn more about how LittleBeats™ works across a broad age range. We want to validate this wearable device in terms of use in the home and with a wide age range of children.

We are interested in children’s relationships with family members. Accordingly, our parent questionnaires ask about your family relationships, along with parents’ feelings. Also, we’ll apply machine learning algorithms to the audio data that will help us understand everyday parent-child interactions. For example, one machine learning algorithm could be the frequency of interactions the child has with parents versus siblings.

We have built and trained neural network (NN) based models, which are considered one of the most popular machine learning algorithms nowadays. To train our models, we used acoustic information about infant/adult vocalizations (e.g., crying, babbling, laughing, singing) that were labeled by human coders. Neural-network models mimic human brain neurons’ activities to learn and distinguish among different vocalizations. Just like the human brain, the more infant/parent data the model sees/learns from, the better it becomes. With this in mind, our models were developed using a variety of data.

All information from your participation will be kept strictly confidential. Data are stored securely in locked cabinets and password protected files and are made available only to the project staff. All your information will be marked by identification numbers only, and data will be examined using machine learning algorithms.

Your family’s privacy is our number one priority! If you would like your audio data to be permanently deleted, please contact us at ui-littlebeats@illinois.edu or (217)-244-2945 or let a project coordinator know during your visit.

Your family’s privacy is our number one priority. The audio recording will be processed by machine learning algorithms, meaning that no one will be listening to your full audio recording. We listen to a few short 2-minute snippets of audio to check that the machine is accurate. You can request that any recording be deleted, and you are free to pause the recording at any time. Neither a human nor the machine will ever transcribe what is said in the recordings.

The data collected by LittleBeats™ will be processed by a machine learning algorithm. A machine learning algorithm allows computers to do all of the work of taking input data and outputting results, which, in turn, keeps your data more protected and private from human research staff.

If your child is interested in learning more about how this process works, we suggest reading this introductory article to machine learning!

https://towardsdatascience.com/childrens-guide-to-machine-learning-b90171f86cef

A computer software program will automatically detect when your child is vocalizing and what type of vocalization they are making (e.g., screech, babble, laugh). Those vocalizations tell something about your child’s emotional state and how these emotional states co-occur with physiological changes that the LittleBeats™ pick up like heart rate. It will look at how these vocalizations change across the day in home life. If you would like more specific details about speech algorithms, our Project Director, Dr. Nancy McElwain, would be happy to answer your questions.