Baby Decoder Ring Finally Developed

(PHOTO: Addrox Karpenkopf.)

Japanese computer scientists are awesome, aren’t they? I mean, really. They’ve gone and made a program that can tell new parents if their baby is crying because it’s in pain, or just because.

The team has employed sound pattern recognition approach that uses a statistical analysis of the frequency of cries and the power function of the audio spectrum to classify different types of crying. They were then able to correlate the different recorded audio spectra with a baby’s emotional state as confirmed by the child’s parents. In their tests recordings of crying babies with a painful genetic disorder, were used to make differentiating between the babies’ pained cries and other types of crying more obvious. They achieved 100% success rate in a validation to classify pained cries and “normal” cries.

No word on whether the program can translate complex sentences, such as “Stop pinching my cheeks or I’ll bite you, lady!”

Via Eureka News.