A team of developmental scientists and medical social science experts at Northwestern University has led the development of a new version of the NIH Toolbox, now providing a standardized assessment tool for infants as young as 16 days up to 42 months old.
Previously, the NIH Toolbox was designed for children aged three years and older, leaving a gap in early childhood assessment. Early identification of developmental delays is considered important because these challenges can have lasting effects if not addressed promptly.
The newly released NIH Baby Toolbox uses an iPad app that employs videos and eye-tracking technology to measure cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional skills in infants who are too young to answer questions or complete written tasks. This approach makes use of gaze-based learning paradigms previously used only in research laboratories.
Sandra Waxman, Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, explained the significance: “Now, armed with the first-ever standardized, validated and widely available assessment tool, clinicians will be able to identify infant development and detect when development is going awry,” Waxman said. “This early assessment, and the intervention that may follow, will support positive developmental outcomes in a way that was not possible before.”
Richard Gershon from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine served as principal investigator for the project. Gershon highlighted improvements over previous tools: “The NIH Baby Toolbox dovetails with the first NIH Toolbox for children and adults to make longitudinal assessments seamless,” he said. “Researchers, clinicians and even school personnel now have access to tools to enable precise developmental measurement in a fraction of the administration time, with no per patient costs, fully automated or guided scoring, and with a fraction of the training time required by similar tests.”
To develop this toolset for tablet use among very young children, researchers surveyed more than 400 domain experts and conducted a literature review to select appropriate measures. Aaron Kaat, scientific director for the NIH Baby Toolbox at Feinberg School of Medicine noted: “We were contracted to identify existing measures that could be administered on the iPad, but we found that many widely used measures required extensive training or were too expensive for regular research and clinical use,” Kaat said. “For many of the measures in the Baby Toolbox we worked with top research teams across the country to create new measures that met our requirements.”
Before its release, more than 2,500 infants and toddlers from English- and Spanish-speaking households participated in validation studies demonstrating reliability across diverse populations.
An eight-article special issue detailing development and validation appears online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/108S3JV73J2; print publication is scheduled for September.
More information about this tool can be found at http://www.nihbabytoolbox.org.
The project received funding from federal sources including Blueprint for Neuroscience Research and NICHD under contract number 75N94019D00005.