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Phase: Research Missions: OTHER FIELDS

Brain Bit: Helping parents create stimulating language environments; a word counter for families.

Brain Bit is a wearable technology that empowers families to count the number of words their children are hearing. Over and again research has demonstrated that creating a rich language environment is crucial to early cognitive development. Brain Bit empowers families to close the word gap by providing them with real time feedback on the quality of their child's language environment.

Photo of Chris Drew
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Brain Bit is a wearable device that empowers families to measure and track their child's language environment by providing a word count. There are reems of research that shows the linkage between a child's long-term success and how many words your children hear by the age of 5. BrainBit helps to track this and motivate parents and other caregivers to increase language exposure. 

Children who are exposed to more words, and who have high quality conversational interactions with adults, perform better in school and go on to have successes in other domains of life. The differences between those who hear many words and those who hear fewer words is known in research circles as the "Word Gap". Brain Bit helps families close the word gap by providing families with real-time insights about the number of words their child is hearing, the quality of conversational interactions, the influencers in a child's environment and more. 

Having information and data about what is going into your child's ears can help you adjust your interactions so you can create the most stimulating environment possible. 

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Mother Mentors for Child Development [updated Jan 5]
Mother Mentors for Child Development [updated Jan 5]

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Photo of Maurizio Bricola

Great initiative Chris, we are also looking at "assistive" and wearable technology as a possible solution to the 0 to 5 challenge. We would like to focus on nutrition, anti and post natal health self assessments and reminders, DIY remedies (like ORS) and reading and story telling. Main challenges are: devices should not require power charge, device should not require network, cost of mas production should be below 5USD, a tamagotchi costs about 2 USD see: http://www.enme.umd.edu/ESCML/Papers/Sandborn-teardown-revision-4.pdf page 10 to 15
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