This project will develop a practical and commercially viable system to analyze the Auditory Evoked Response (AER) as a means of very early detection of language and cognitive deficiencies. Thus, infants at risk of developing language and reading disabilities later in life can be targeted for early remediation while the window of opportunity is still open. AER, in association with the use of phonemes as the auditory stimuli, serves as a powerful predictor of future reading difficulties. Research has shown a significant difference in the AER waveforms recorded at birth of children who score poorly on verbal IQ tests compared to normal children at 3, 5, and 8 years of age. The user-friendly AER analysis software package to be developed in this project will compliment the miniature, telemetric EEG hardware data acquisition system currently under development by Cleveland Medical Devices Inc. The comprehensive software will be capable of extracting the AER from EEG brain waves responding to auditory stimuli, analyzing it using advanced signal processing techniques to extract a number rf representative features, and classifying its features to assign the AER (and hence the infant) to a particular class of potential verbal IQ with an associated probability level.
Seven million children in the US are affected by language-based learning disabilities. Very early detection of language and related cognitive deficiencies will allow the parents, health care professionals, and educators to help the infants overcome their deficiency while the window of opportunity is still open. This results in a much more productive society both in economic and social terms.
