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Advancing Early Developmental Screening October 2026

Cribsy receives NIH Phase II funding to validate home-based developmental screening

Early Markers is pleased to share that the National Institutes of Health has awarded a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant of approximately $2 million over three years to validate Cribsy, our smartphone-based screener for neuromotor risk in infants. The award comes from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and runs through August 2029.

 

The problem we are working on

Early intervention changes outcomes for children with developmental delays, but it depends on early identification, and fewer than a third of children with developmental disabilities are identified before they enter school. Families in rural areas, on tribal lands, and in communities short of pediatric specialists wait longest. Cribsy is built to move the first screen into the home: parents record short videos of their infant on a phone, and AI models analyze the infant’s movement to flag risk for a clinician to review.

What Phase II will do

  • A validation study of 300 infants across twenty pop-up clinics, sampled across ages, risk levels, and geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds, with a statistically powered protocol.
  • Community clinics run with Patient Navigators. The pop-up model we developed in Phase I, in partnership with trusted local navigators, will carry the study into rural and under-resourced communities in Washington and beyond.
  • Integration with pediatric practice through CHADIS, a platform used in more than 250 practices, so a positive Cribsy screen can be triaged alongside the questionnaires pediatricians already use.
  • Explainable results for clinicians and clear guidance for parents, including interactive prompts that help families capture the right videos.
  • Open science. De-identified datasets and the trained pose-estimation and movement-classification models will be released publicly before the project ends.

The team

The project is led by Bharath Modayur, PhD, Early Markers’ founder and Cribsy’s inventor. Teresa Fair-Field, OTD, OTR/L, serves as clinical lead, overseeing recruitment and the screening clinics. Mara Modayur, RN, coordinates the study. David Li supports the software platform. Monika Mahal, MD, advises on pediatric practice.

Thank you

This award follows a Phase I project made possible by the families who recorded videos of their infants, the Patient Navigators who opened their communities to us, and the Lummi Nation, the Nooksack Tribe, and our partners in Whatcom County and Kansas who hosted clinics. We are grateful to NICHD for its continued support.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44HD115478. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Cribsy Phase I: Successful pilot sets up clinical validation

Between mid-2024 and 2025, with support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Early Markers ran the first funded test of Cribsy: could parents at home, using nothing but a phone, produce the video an AI system needs to screen an infant for neuromotor risk, and could we take that screen to the communities that need it most? Here is what the Phase I project delivered.

The platform

  • A working app, in English and Spanish. Cribsy’s beta was released as a web app and as native iOS and Android apps. Parents receive prompts, record short videos of their infant in set postures, and upload them from home.
  • AI that reads infant movement. We built and tuned models for infant pose estimation and for classifying neuromotor risk from the resulting movement features, and an analysis pipeline that processes uploaded videos automatically. By the end of Phase I we had automated the retraining loop so the models can keep improving as data accrues.
  • A standardized assessment, automated. To show the platform extends beyond a single screen, we automated the Alberta Infant Motor Scale, a widely used instrument for infants from 3 to 18 months.
  • Explainability. Clinicians need to know why a screen flagged a child. We demonstrated explainable-AI reports that show which movement features drove a classification, and added a chatbot built from CDC developmental guidance to answer parents’ questions inside the app.

The clinics

The part of Phase I we are proudest of happened away from the keyboard. To reach infants in rural and Native communities, we ran four pop-up screening clinics in Washington and Kansas, including two on tribal lands with the Lummi Nation and the Nooksack Tribe. Each clinic was organized with a local Patient Navigator, a trusted community member who recruited families, arranged the venue and translation, helped parents record and upload videos, and followed up afterward with families whose infants were referred for further evaluation. Forty infants took part. Every participating parent was able to record and upload multiple home videos when prompted, which answered the question we most needed answered.

The numbers, with the right caveat

On the Phase I data, a compact set of twenty movement features, kinematic measures plus the infant’s age, distinguished at-risk from typically developing infants with a sensitivity of 92% and a specificity of 77.5%. Those are pilot figures from a small sample and they exist to design the next study, not to make clinical claims. Their practical effect was to shrink the number of infants the Phase II validation study needs, which is good news for the families and clinics involved.

Toward the pediatrician’s office

Phase I also looked hard at how Cribsy fits real pediatric practice: workflow, reimbursement, and regulatory pathways. Multiple screens used together improve accuracy and reduce unnecessary referrals, so we positioned Cribsy as an objective second screen alongside questionnaire-based tools, and began a collaboration with CHADIS, a platform used in over 250 pediatric practices that collects hundreds of thousands of parent questionnaires each month.

What comes next

Phase I ended with a patent issued on Cribsy’s core method and a Phase II application that reviewers scored well. That application has now been funded, and the next post describes what the next three years look like.

Research reported here was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43HD115478. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

  • Washington State University