Skip to content
Health
Link copied to clipboard

Baby translation?

I think I'm pretty good at translating the cries of my infant daughter. She's six months old and I can usually tell the difference between a "feed me" cry and a "change me" cry – worst case scenario a sniff will clue me in pretty quick.

But apparently researchers in Japan are taking a page out of The Simpsons' book and developing technology that could result in a baby translator similar to the one Homer's half brother Herb invented in an episode first broadcast in 1992. Scientists at Muroran Institute of Technology in Hokkaido, Japan reported, "we developed a novel method … to classify the causes of crying infant[s] based on patter recognition of [the] power spectrum of the cry."

The research published last month in the International Journal of Biometrics could pave the way for a machine to translate baby cries. "The result of our method achieves an excellent prediction," the researchers said. They said they were able to validate a 100 percent success rate in differentiating between pained and normal cries.

So, maybe this could be useful if they invent a baby monitor that only woke me up when it was really important. After all at 3:30 a.m. after too many weeks with too little sleep I'm not all that nurturing and really need some guilt-free sleep.