Description
HEBC Research Wellbeing Talk Series: Session 5:Tablet-Based App to Assess Early Child Development in Low-Resource Settings
Speaker: Dr Nick Thompson
Organisers/ Chairs: Dr Kimberley Hill and Dr Josephine Chen-Wilson
Abstract
It is estimated that 95% (50.2 million) of children with developmental disabilities reside in low or middle-income countries (Olusanya et al., 2018). This is exacerbated by the scarcity of skilled professionals for early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), and their skewed distribution to urban, often private, clinics, as well as their reliance on time-intensive, specialist-dependent, proprietary assessment tools. To address these issues, the STREAM project is developing and validating an open-source, scalable assessment tool in the form of a tablet-based app to assess the neurodevelopmental status of children and identify those at-risk of NDDs. STREAM is an Scalable Transdiagnostic Early Assessment of Mental Health (STREAM): Developing a interdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscientists, paediatricians, psychologists, statisticians, public health researchers, and computer scientists from nine institutions across four countries.
The STREAM app incorporates gamified tasks, observation checklists, parent-report, and audio/video recordings, to assess abilities relevant to the domains of social, cognitive, and motor development. Each task within STREAM has been designed to be culturally agnostic, and the app can function entirely offline, enabling administration in the field by non-specialist workers without the need for additional infrastructure. The app is currently being tested on N=4000 children from community and NDD-risk samples in India and Malawi. The metrics derived from the app will be validated against a gold-standard measure of child development (the Griffiths Mental Development Scales; Griffiths, 1970) and assessed in terms of their ability to highlight the role of social, behavioural, and neural risk factors known to impact development. In this talk, I will discuss the STREAM project background, study protocols, progress to date, and some interim results.
| Period | 17 Jan 2024 |
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| Event type | Other |