Rather than focus on a particular stage of brain development or particular developmental challenge, this project focuses on a systemic problem in the management of early childhood development: lack of information flow from healthcare providers to parents and vice-versa. This communication problem has three facets:

• There is a lack of parental knowledge on best practices in child safety, socio-emotional development and language learning, among others.
• Most communication to parents on best-practices is irrelevant or difficult to understand. Information provided to parents does not adapt over time, meaning it is not tailored to the parent/child’s circumstances and needs. The timing of information (not only over the course of months, but throughout the day) is highly critical to ensure engagement and behavior change, but rarely considered.
• Lack of feedback to healthcare providers: there is a delay in investigating potentially problematic symptoms or improper parenting behaviors, meaning these issues are often not caught early.

Due to these communication issues, parents do not have the tools to ensure the best brain development for their children, and healthcare providers cannot identify worrying developmental issues for early intervention. Thus, there is a clear need for a scalable communication solution.

Tá Na Hora Digital Health has developed SMS-based communication technologies for the pharmaceutical & health industries in Brazil. Several of their interactive SMS-based “engagement programs” can be used by medical providers (i.e. pediatricians, visiting nurses, etc.) to educate and remind parents on best practices for their child. They can also be used by providers and parents to monitor child brain development.

A  web-based application has been developed that makes it easy to quickly build and edit interactive SMS-based engagement programs. These highly-customized programs are completely automated, and scalable across thousands of  recipients.

This intervention aims to pilot and scale these programs for new mothers, to help in a wide array of early brain development areas. These programs will initially provide valuable information to new mothers, send reminders, and track development milestones of the child; if identified, they will help then help manage development of at-risk children.

Text messages received by the mother could include reminders for immunization and doctor visits, tips about safety, nutrition, and care, and monitoring of child development, parental behaviors and symptom management.

Text messages can be tailored to arrive at specified times of the day, depending on the different parent. Text messages received by the mother include reminders for immunization and doctor visits but message content can also be automatically customized to the recipient; for instance, to include personal information relevant for their child’s particular stage of development or medical or socio-economic condition. Recipient parents can reply to messages; for instance, they can report on behaviors or symptoms of their child. The system will automatically adjust subsequent questions based on the answers provided. The result is a seamless, highly customized, and engaging interaction with the parent.

This communication technology will demonstrate its effectiveness if mothers are engaged with the system, find the program useful, learn new things, and change their behavior.