IS YOUR BABY HUNGRY, TIRED OR IN NEED OF A CLEAN NAPPY? THIS APP WILL TELL YOU

A common fear for first-time parents especially, is not being able to understand their baby’s cry. But now a Taiwanese team have developed an app to tell parents if their baby is hungry, tired, in pain or needs a clean nappy.

Over three years, researchers collected about 300,000 sounds from 100 babies at the National Taiwan University Hospital. From this they developed the Infant Crying Translator, an app that uses a cloud-based database to decode babies’ cries from newborn to six months old.

The app takes only 15 seconds to come up with a translation; tap “record” and a clip of the infant’s captured cry is uploaded to the database. The file is then compared to its samples and a verdict appears on screen.

After winning an innovation award from Taiwan’s government in 2014, Infant Crying Translator went on sale for Android and iPhone in 2015 and now has about 10,000 users worldwide.

According to user feedback, accuracy reaches 92 per cent for babies under two weeks old. For babies under two months, accuracy is lower but showing an improvement, to reach as high as 85 per cent. For a four-month-old baby, accuracy is 77 per cent and rising.