Recording every minute move of the child can become an obsession for many. But imagine capturing them on camera 24x7.
MIT professor Deb Roy is recording every syllable his child utters.
MUMBAI/BOSTON: The cry of a newborn is the most welcome sound for a parent. Then on, recording every minute move of the child can become an obsession for many. But imagine capturing them on camera 24x7x365.
That is exactly what Associate Professor Deb Roy, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab's cognitive machines research group, has been doing since his son came home from hospital nine months ago. Roy's project is not just a father's wish to watch his son grow up but a scientific experiment: the round-the-clock monitoring aims at unravelling the process by which children learn to talk. It was recently reported by the weekly magazine New Scientist.
Roy, who has devised the unusual project, volunteered his family to be monitored by 14 microphones and 11 one-megapixel "fish-eye" video cameras attached to the ceilings of every room in their house. The effort is dubbed ‘The Human Speechome Project'.
The cameras, switched on between 8am and 10pm each day, will capture 85 per cent of the baby's waking hours up to his third birthday. For occasional privacy, Roy and his wife can switch off the cameras or delete recordings using wall-mounted touch displays. Footage recorded by the cameras is automatically transmitted to the MIT lab for analysis. Comparing later recordings with earlier ones of sounds made by Roy's son will help his team to better understand the stimuli crucial to language development.
But putting the child under the microscope raises ethical questions. When DNA spoke to psychiatrists in Mumbai, they were divided on Roy's study.
Dr Anjali Chhabria warned: "Putting the child in an artificial environment and filming him consciously would be bad for his emotional health." But she gave the project the benefit of doubt.
Dr Harish Shetty said that although research endeavours such as Roy's appear unfriendly to humans, they are important. "Just as we need to study the heart, brain and other organs of humans, we need to study their emotional and behavioural aspects as well."
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