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.