Is the baby crying too much? Try to follow his heartbeat
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What to do if your child suddenly cries for no apparent reason in the middle of the night? The crying fits of children and babies sometimes put parents in great difficulty. They feel helpless because they cannot calm and comfort them. Science can help.
A research group from Trento of the Affiliative Behavior and Physiology Lab of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences has highlighted the role of heartbeat as an index of child well-being and he has been involved in the design for years of new technologies low cost able to monitor it.
The importance of crying
Crying is a language: it is the first means of communication for a newborn. “Its function, especially in early childhood, is to communicate states of discomfort to the outside world. It can have different origins (hunger, pain, sleep, colic, noise) and has different manifestations depending on the origin”, he explains Gianluca EspositoProfessor of Clinical Psychology and Head of the Affiliative Behavior and Physiology Lab of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Trento.
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A newborn is an innate behavior, written in our genes for the survival of puppies. “Several tens of thousands of years ago, certainly from the primates onwards we can speak of crying” continues Dr. Esposito. In all mammals, puppies need contact with the mother because it has beneficial effects on a child’s organism as “the tactile stimulation of contact and the proprioceptive and vestibular stimulation due to movement have a calming effect”.
What science says
A study, published in Current Biologyled by Kumi Kuroda, of the Riken Center for Brain Science in Saitama, Japan, has found a formula to calm the newborn in no time: he recommends that parents pick up the crying baby, walk with him for 5 minutes, then sit and hold him. arm for five to eight minutes before placing it back in the cot. In this way, a child in the throes of a crying fit stops crying within 30 seconds, closes the eyelids, calms down and falls asleep.
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Why does the child reach that state of well-being in such a short period of time? “Because the parasympathetic system is activated, on three levels, with a lowering of the heart rhythm, a lowering of voluntary movements with a postural adjustment and a decrease in the intensity of crying”, explains Esposito. The same beneficial effect is not found with the stroller, the cradle or the swing because while giving proprioceptive and vestibular stimulation there is no contact with the mother. “Tactile stimulation is different.”
Rompers, cots and apps
Science is developing low-cost technologies that can help us measure the physiological states of newborns. “We have been committed on various fronts to the development of technologies to help new parents. In Trento we tested rompers that allow the measurement of physiological states in collaboration with an Italian company in Monza. My group has also collaborated with the creator of a cradle. that rocks able to calm the crying baby “says Esposito.
Equally important and very useful will be the applications that new parents can install on their smartphones to monitor the physiological functions of their child such as heartbeat. “From the app front, we worked at Codic to identify crying and understand its causes, a product that has not yet been completed and patented,” explains Esposito.
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Low cost technologies
The idea of evaluating the feasibility of applying different technologies came a few years ago, “while I was in Japan with my family and I was studying parental interaction patterns in different mammal species. I had an insight, thanks even in the presence of my first newborn baby “.
There are data that demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. “We have done numerous studies, regarding some commercial products, for patent reasons the data have not been published, but we have a decade of data with the different technologies”, adds Esposito.
The experimentation is applied on reference samples located in Italy and internationally such as Singapore, Japan and the United States. Technology can help parents during their baby’s crying crisis to get feedback on the baby’s physiological state because it can help the parent stay calm.
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Various crying technologies
“The parent learns to differentiate the sound of the different types of crying. We have published numerous studies also using neuroimaging on this phenomenon. He has a series of external indicators at his disposal: when the baby ate, when / how much he slept, etc.” explains Esposito.
Monitoring the baby’s heartbeat can be an index of well-being because “a calm baby has a slower heartbeat and above all greater variability. Evaluating cardiac variability indices gives us a lot of information about the baby’s well-being, calm and activation”.
There are other parameters that have been considered for which the app is able to monitor, such as heart rate indices and acoustic crying rates, but are still in development.
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