A New Tool for Evaluating Learning Disabilities in Children

Earlier this week, we profiled a new tool to detect pain in infants. Today, it’s learning disabilities in kids. Based on more than a decade of neuroscience research at Northwestern University, the BioMAP (Biological Marker of Auditory Processing) is now commercially available:

“Learning disabilities are believed to affect nearly one in 10 children, but their causes are difficult to pinpoint,” says Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory. Kraus and Northwestern researchers Trent Nicol and Steven Zecker have found that a third of the 1,000-plus children they have tested show a dysfunction in the way the brainstem encodes basic sounds of speech…
“The beauty of BioMAP as a diagnostic tool is that it does not require a child to follow directions or perform an assigned task,” says Kraus. “Instead, it objectively measures whether a child’s nervous system is able to accurately translate sounds into brain waves.” If it can’t, the affected child will have difficulty discriminating between speech sounds. And that difficulty at the most fundamental level complicates a wide range of learning activities, including reading and writing, Kraus finds.
Getting objective measures from BioMAP software is simple. “All a child needs to do is stay awake and sit quietly for 20 to 30 minutes,” says Kraus, Northwestern’s Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences, Neurobiology and Otolaryngology.

Ha! We are on a pediatrics rotation now and can confidently say THIS TEST WILL NEVER WORK, no child can sit still for more than a few seconds unless high-dose sedatives are in use.
More from Northwestern and Natus, Inc…