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Northwestern Medicine unveils National Institute of Health Baby Toolbox | ChicagoNOW
Developmental scientists and medical social science experts at Northwestern University have spearheaded the creation of the most recent National Institute of Health Toolbox. This provides the newest nationally standardized assessment of cognitive, language, motor and social-emotional skill development in infants aged 16 days to 42 months. Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine's Richard Gershon discusses what led to the toolbox's creation.
CHICAGO - Experts at Northwestern University unveiled a new tool to help track the cognitive, language, motor skills, and social-emotional skill development for infants as young as 16 days old.
The new National Institutes of Health Toolbox provides a research-based, nationally standardized way to assess infants and toddlers.
What we know:
The previous version of the toolbox only covered kids as young as 3 years of age, leaving a "serious gap," according to the developmental scientists and medical social science experts at Northwestern.
So what’s in the toolbox?
Northwestern professor Richard Gershon said the toolbox includes a series of 40 measures that can be given to children. He discussed the details on ChicagoNOW.
"We can identify, broadly based on cognitive functioning, things such as language development and executive functioning," he said. "Motor functioning – where is a child at relative ability to get up, to walk, to move around – social-emotional functioning."
Gershon said until now, children would mostly be assessed by parents’ observation, but there needed to be a more objective way to measure the development, particularly for use by researchers and clinicians.
He added that the researchers are "not quite ready yet for parents to give this to parents on their own," but parents would be the ones to naturally observe and assess the kids.
The test can be used through an iPad app as the device can follow where a child is looking at the screen. It can also record the baby’s motor behavior to measure their development.
Why you should care:
So why is such an assessment so important so early?
Gershon said the point is to see if the child is on track, but child development "varies widely."
"As parents, you know if you have more than one child, they develop differently," he said. "That’s all OK."
But scientists believe these tools might be able to detect early signs of autism or diseases, which would allow a doctor or educator to use interventions early in the child’s life.
Still, Gershon cautioned to not read too much into measurements if the child is not developing like their peers.
"Most children grow up to be very productive," he said. "And what the NIH toolbox just allows us is to assess that, track it in research studies."
He added that such measures are being used in a study with 70,000 children to measure the impact of the environment, like pollution or plastics, on kids’ development.
"As parents, we worry about all these things, but on some of those things, there’s not objective evidence," Gershon said. "This is it. We’ve invented a tool for clinicians to look at those things."