Cribsy's core technology is now patented

On April 8, 2025, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent No. 12,272,054, "Systems and Methods for Developmental Monitoring of Children," to BSOLUTIONS Inc. (doing business as Early Markers). It covers the approach at the heart of Cribsy: turning ordinary videos that parents record at home into objective measures of an infant's motor development and determining neurodevelopmental risks.

What the patent covers

In plain terms, the patented system takes videos of an infant, locates the body and its parts in each frame, extracts a set of features that describe how the infant moves and holds posture, and from those features computes metrics that indicate where the child stands developmentally, compared to typically-developing children in similar age brackets. 

That is the sequence Cribsy performs every time a parent uploads a video: pose estimation, kinematic feature extraction, and a risk classification that a clinician can review. 

Why it matters for families

Fewer than a third of children with developmental disabilities are identified before they start school, and the gap is widest in rural and under-resourced communities where a developmental specialist may be hours away. Cribsy's premise is that a smartphone and a parent's own video can bring a first screen into the home. A patent does not change the science, but it does give a small company the footing to keep building: it protects the method as Cribsy moves from research toward clinical use, and it makes partnerships with pediatric platforms and health systems easier to structure.

Our commitment to open science stands. Cribsy's development has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, and as part of our Phase II work we will release de-identified datasets and the trained AI models for pose estimation and movement classification so other researchers can build on them. The patent protects the integrated screening system that we will commercialize upon successful clinical validation of Cribsy.

How to cite

Modayur, B. (2025). Systems and methods for developmental monitoring of children (U.S. Patent No. 12,272,054). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

This invention was made with government support under grant number HD095783 awarded by the National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The U.S. Government has certain rights in the invention.