Use of smartphone technology to identify infants at highest risk of cerebral palsy: a pilot feasibility trial (“Baby Moves App”)

The General Movement Assessment (GMA) is the most accurate and sensitive tool to detect cerebral palsy (CP) in the young infant. While the GMA has been recommended as standard of practice in evaluation of infants at high-risk of developing CP, the implementation across multiple US centers has been limited by the lack of GMA-trained clinicians, variation in age at standard neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) follow-up visits, and distance required for families to travel for follow-up. Given that the GMA can be scored from a short video, with no specific handling needed, it is possible to evaluate the infant general movements outside of the clinical setting. A smart-phone app, called Baby Moves was developed by an Australian research team, so that parents can directly upload a video of their infant to be assessed by a clinician trained in the GMA. In this study, we will conduct a pilot trial and include local NICU centers. High-risk infants will be recruited from these centers in order to establish feasibility of this app in an urban, US-based cohort. Data from this pilot program will be used to establish a database of general movements which can be used for future research studies on neurological, genetic, and musculoskeletal biomarker early intervention strategies, neurodevelopmental outcome, and recruitment into the Cerebral Palsy Registry. This pilot effort can then be applied to NIH NICHD and NINDS multicenter studies of neuroprotection and neuroplasticity. Funding from this study will be used to pay for use of the Baby Moves App software, obtain a research coordinator to assist with recruitment and data preparation, create a recruitment and explainer video for participating families, fund GMA raters to assess the videos obtained from the app and to help test outcomes of those infants who have suspicious findings, and to provide some incentive funding for those infants who require a follow-up visit.