Trademark 3840-480

IMU inline toys for assessing infant cognitive development

Ages 0-5 are a sensitive period of neurodevelopment when EFs (executive functions-Executive functions), which are critical to physical and mental health, emerge. In modern clinical and research practice, coders collect EF performance data by manually marking infants' behaviors on video during toy use or social interactions, a time-consuming and subjective judgment-dependent approach.

To make data collection easier, the team in Singapore developed an instrumented toy with an embedded inertial measurement unit (IMU) that detects when and how infants interact with the toy and provides a rich data set to identify shifts in mental stereotypes. These toys can also detect when and how much they are squeezed to further validate changes in infants' mental categorization from shape-based to material-based categorization.