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The feasibility of a crowd-based early developmental milestone tracking application
Ayelet Ben-Sasson1, Kayla Jacobs2, Eli Ben-Sasson3
1Occupational Therapy Department, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Insights
Parents using the babyTRACKS app tracked developmental milestones, adding new ones and highlighting interest in regulation and oral motor skills. This crowdsourcing approach engages parents in proactive developmental tracking.
Area of Science:
- Child Development
- Digital Health
- Parental Engagement
Background:
- Tracking developmental milestones is crucial for early detection of delays and intervention.
- Crowdsourcing offers a method to enhance and update developmental checklists.
- The babyTRACKS mobile app facilitates parent-led tracking of child development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate which developmental milestones parents prioritize tracking.
- To identify novel milestones added by parents beyond traditional checklists.
- To assess the feasibility of a crowd-based approach for developmental milestone tracking.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of developmental diaries from 3,832 children in the babyTRACKS app.
- Parents selected from existing milestones or authored new ones.
- Milestones were categorized into developmental domains (e.g., Gross Motor, Cognitive, Speech).
Main Results:
- Parents recorded a median of 5 milestones per child, with 89.15% being developmental.
- Crowd-authored milestones were prevalent in Regulation and Oral Motor domains.
- Crowd-authored Speech milestones appeared significantly later (7 months) than CDC milestones.
Conclusions:
- Crowdsourcing effectively captures parent-identified developmental milestones, especially in Regulation and Oral Motor domains.
- Parents may need more support in recognizing early Language Comprehension and Speech milestones.
- Crowd-based mobile screening tools can empower parents as active partners in child development monitoring.
Objective:
Parents' tracking of developmental milestones can assist healthcare providers with early detection of developmental delays and appropriate referrals to early intervention. Crowdsourcing is one way to update the content and age data distribution of developmental checklists for parents and providers. This feasibility study examined which developmental milestones parents chose to track and what they added beyond traditional milestones, using the babyTRACKS crowd-based mobile app.
Method:
We analyzed the developmental diaries of 3,832 children, registered in the babyTRACKS app at an average age of 9.3 months. Their parents recorded a median of 5 milestones per diary, selecting from the accumulating lists of age-appropriate milestones or authoring new milestones. The final database included 645 types of milestones; 89.15% were developmental, of which 43.6% were comparable to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) milestones while the rest were crowd-authored. Milestones were categorized into developmental domains: Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Oral Motor, Self-Care, Cognitive, Language Comprehension, Speech, Non-Verbal Communication, Social, Emotional, and Regulation.
Results:
On average, the milestone domains of Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Cognitive and Social were the most added to diaries (20%-30% of a diary). Within the Cognitive, Speech and Language Comprehension domains there were significantly more CDC comparable versus crowd-authored milestones (29% versus 21%, 22% versus 10%, 8% versus 4%). In contrast, within the Regulation and Oral Motor domains there were more crowd versus CDC milestones (17% versus 3%, 9% versus 3%). Crowd-authored Speech milestones were significantly older by 7 months than CDC milestones.
Conclusion:
Tracking daily observations of child development provides a window into personally relevant milestones for the child and parent. The crowd of parents can independently track and add new milestones across main developmental domains. Regulation and Oral Motor development especially interest parents. Parents may be less aware of early progress in Language Comprehension and Speech; thus, these domains require more structured screening. Designing mobile early screening which is crowd-based engages parents as proactive partners in developmental tracking.
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