A survey on the attitudes of parents with young children on in-home monitoring technologies and study designs for infant research

Abstract

Remote in-home infant monitoring technologies hold great promise for increasing the scalability and safety of infant research (including in regard to the current Covid-19 pandemic), but remain rarely employed. These technologies hold a number of fundamental challenges and ethical concerns that need addressing to aid the success of this fast-growing field. In particular, the responsible development of such technologies requires caregiver input. We conducted a survey of the opinions of 410 caregivers on the viability, privacy and data access of remote in-home monitoring technologies and study designs. Infant-friendly wearable devices (such as sensing body suits) were viewed favourably. Caregivers were marginally more likely to accept video and audio recording in the home if data was anonymised (through automated processing) at point of collection, particularly when observations were lengthy. Caregivers were more open to international data sharing for anonymous data. Caregivers were interested in viewing all types of data, but were particularly keen to access video and audio recordings for censoring purposes (i.e., to delete data segments). Taken together, our results indicate generally positive attitudes to remote in-home monitoring technologies and studies for infant research but highlight specific considerations such as safety, privacy and family practicalities (e.g. multiple caregivers, visitors and varying schedules) that must be taken into account when developing future studies.

Automatic assessment of infant carrying and holding using at-home wearable recordings

“…Recent technological development has introduced new possibilities for recording and analyzing such out-of-hospital recordings based on measuring movements, audio, or video 1 , 7 . Parental surveys have indicated privacy concerns with in-home audio and video recordings 8 , 9 favoring the use of movement sensors that collect far less identifiable data. Such movement sensors would typically collect tri-axial measures of both linear acceleration (accelerometer) and angular velocity (gyroscope) 10 , 11 , and they can be attached to infants individually 12 , 13 or by using more comprehensive multi-sensor suits 5 , 10 , 14 .…”

NAPping PAnts (NAPPA): An open wearable solution for monitoring Infant's sleeping rhythms, respiration and posture

“…The video-based assessments could potentially provide feasible accuracy [ 12 , 19 , 34 ]. However, their utility is limited by the practical challenges and privacy concerns with at-home recordings [ [34] , [35] , [36] ]. Yet, an objective and reliable identification of sleep architecture would be essential to understand sleep from an infant's perspective more than the parental perspective available from the sleep diaries.…”

“… No privacy concerns Parents and caregivers are not concerned about the potential to compromise privacy. Additionally, the raw recording data per se is inherently non-identifying [ 12 , 18 , [34] , [35] , [36] ]. X X (X) X – …”