Overview

STREAM (Scalable Transdiagnostic Early Assessment of Mental health) aims to create a scalable tablet-based assessment tool for non-specialists to assess the development of children aged 0-6 years in the attention and cognition, fine motor, and social domains. It will map population distribution scores for these key developmental domains and test the utility of this transdiagnostic platform in identifying delayed development or the presence of any developmental disorders. The ability of the tool to measure the impact of adversities on brain development, its test-retest reliability, and its ability to monitor change in development over time will also be determined. 

Rationale

The first six years after birth are a period of rapid growth and development. By age six, a child’s brain has developed to 90% of its adult size, and healthy development in this period lays the foundation for health and well-being in childhood and long-term potential as an adult. It is essential for development in the cognitive, social and fine motor domains to be regularly monitored at a population-level, by empowering non-specialist workers with scalable assessment tools so that children faltering in their development can be triaged into early effective interventions to improve their outcomes.

Progress till date

Trained 6 non-specialists on using STREAM app to conduct assessments in India 

Each site has conducted assessments on over 2000 children, 1850 typically developing children from communities in low-resource neighborhoods and 150 clinically diagnosed neuro-divergent children. Test-rest and longitudinal follow-up assessments have been done on a subset of the sample.

Partner/s

• Prof. Bhismadev Chakrabarti - University of Reading, UK

• Prof. Melissa Gladstone- University of Liverpool, UK

• Prof. Mark Johnson- University of Cambridge, UK

• Prof. Emily Jones- Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

• Dr. Gareth McCray, Keele University, Newcastle, UK

• Prof. Vikram Patel- Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

• Prof. Sharat Chandran- Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Maharashtra, India

• Dr. Emmie Mbale- University of Malawi, Malawi