Wearable brain imaging device reveals how babies react in real-world situations

Wearable brain-imaging headgear, developed in collaboration with Gower Labs, a spin-out company from University College London, found unexpected activity in the prefrontal cortex – an area of ​​the brain that processes emotions – in response to social stimuli, seemingly confirming that infants start processing what is happening to them in social situations as early as five months of age.

The new technology can measure neural activity across the entire outer surface of a baby's brain – previous versions developed by the same team could only measure activity in one or two parts of a baby's brain at a time.

The researchers say the technique could map connections between different regions of the brain and reveal differences between typical and atypical neurodevelopment during critical early stages of childhood, helping to shed light on neurodiverse conditions such as autism, dyslexia and ADHD.

The development of the new device and the results of initial testing are documented in a new study. Imaging NeuroscienceIt was unveiled at the British Science Festival on Saturday 14th September.

Dr Liam Collins-Jones, lead author of the study from London University's School of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering and the University of Cambridge, said: “We have previously developed wearable imaging techniques that can map activity in specific areas of the brain.

“But this makes it hard to see the whole picture, because we can only focus on one or two areas, and different parts of the brain work together when navigating real-world scenarios.”

“This new method allows us to see what's going on across the entire outer surface of the brain, underneath the scalp, which is a major step forward. It opens up the possibility of finding interactions between different areas and detecting activity in areas that we haven't looked at before.”

“This more complete picture of brain activity will improve our understanding of how babies' brains work as they interact with the world around them and may help us optimise support for neurodiverse children in the early years.”

“This is the first time a wearable device has been used to measure differences in activity across such a wide range of areas of an infant's brain, including parts of the brain involved in processing sound, vision and emotions,” said study author Prof Emily Jones, from Birkbeck, University of London.

“The techniques developed and tested in this study provide a stepping stone to better understand the brain processes underlying social development that have not previously been observable outside the very limited confines of an MRI scanner.”

“This should allow us to see what's going on in a baby's brain as they play, learn and interact with other people in a very natural way.”

The new device was tested on 16 infants aged 5 to 7 months. The infants, fitted with the device and seated on their parents' laps, were shown videos of actors singing nursery rhymes to mimic social situations, or videos of moving toys, such as a ball rolling down a ramp, to mimic non-social situations.

The researchers observed differences in brain activity between the two scenarios: In addition to the unexpected findings observed in the prefrontal cortex response to social stimuli, the researchers found that responses to social stimuli were more regionalized than responses to non-social stimuli, confirming previous findings from optical neuroimaging and MRI studies.

Currently, the most comprehensive way to see what's going on inside the human brain is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which requires subjects to lie still in a scanner for at least 30 minutes.

The drawback of this approach is that it is difficult to mimic natural scenarios such as interacting with other people or performing tasks, especially since infants need to be asleep or restrained to successfully image brain activity with MRI.

To overcome this problem, the team recently developed a wearable device that can study brain activity in a more natural way using a type of optical neuroimaging technique called high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT), which also has the advantage of being cheaper and more portable than MRI.

In the new study, researchers developed an HD-DOT optical neuroimaging technique that can scan an infant's entire head.

The equipment used in the study is an adaptation of a commercial system developed by Gowerlabs, a UCL spin-out company set up in 2013 by researchers from UCL's Institute of Biomedical Optics.

Dr Rob Cooper, lead author of the study from University of London's School of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, said: “This device is a fantastic example of academic research and commercial technology development working together.”

“Our long-standing collaboration with UCL and Gowerlabs, as well as our academic partners, has been fundamental in the development of the wearable HD-DOT technology.”