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Before babies learn language, the only way they can signal any kind of discomfort to their parents is to cry. Although parents often relate crying to hunger, sleepiness or the need for a diaper change, researchers believe that an infant's cries could potentially reveal a lot more about the baby's health. According to a research team from Brown University and the Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, a possible test to analyze cries could be within our reach.

The team has created a computer-based program that could potentially read babies' cries. The tool would perform acoustic analyses of the sounds, which would then be fed into a baby cry analyzer that the team created. The researchers hope that this combination of tools would then help them identify infants with potential neurological issues or developmental disorders.

"Cry is an early warning sign that can be used in the context of looking at the whole baby. The idea is that cry can be a window into the brain," Barry Lester, director of Brown's Center for the Study of Children at Risk, said. "Early detection of developmental disorders is critical. It can lead to insights into the causes of these disorders and interventions to prevent or reduce the severity of impairment."

 The cry analyzer took the research team two years to create. It works through two steps. In the first phase, the analyzer will record the cries and separate them into 12.5 millisecond frames, which will individually be measured for multiple parameters. These parameters involve frequency characteristics, acoustic volume and voicing. After this step, the analyzer weeds out unnecessary parameters from step one to create a better understanding of the cry as a whole after the frames are combined. At the end of both steps, the system has already accounted for 80 different parameters, with each one informing the researchers of possible clues about the infant's health.

"There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics. Cry analysis can be a noninvasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies," Stephen Sheinkopf, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior from Brown said according to Medical Xpress.

The researchers were able to tie certain cries to possible disorders by studying different pitches, lengths, and other acoustic aspects.