Baby CROINC: an online, crowd-based, expert-curated system for monitoring child development

Abstract

Baby CROINC (CROwd INtelligence Curation) is an online early-childhood development tracker designed to be both personalized and objective. To meet these goals, we rely on Curated Crowd Intelligence (CCI), a process in which experts curate personalized inputs to connect with the crowd's aggregate data, providing parents with objective and personalized feedback on their children's development. In this paper, we describe Baby CROINC's design, with a focus on CCI, and assess the extent to which it meets its design goals of objectivity and personalization. In Baby CROINC, parents create a diary by adding developmental milestones to a timeline. Visual statistics are presented per milestone. Expert curators clarify, merge, and classify milestones which are new to the system. Diary personalization was evident through users' rich and diverse milestone choices, and by the continuous system increase in new canonical developmental concepts. Findings demonstrate the objectivity of the crowd-based percentiles extracted from Baby CROINC, based on consistency of developmental differences in preterm vs. fullterm and boys vs. girls with established research, and the correlation between medians reported in our system and those appearing on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Milestones webpage.1 CCI led to a dramatic increase in users' ability to view crowd-based statistics, indicating that CCI is critical for enabling objectivity while maintaining personalization.