Brain imaging technology designed for babies - BBC World Service

There's a huge amount we don't know about the healthy brain in this age range. So studying babies who are, say, six months old with existing technologies like fMRI basically means they have to be asleep or sedated. And the knock-on effect of that is that you can't really study a lot of the really interesting things that are happening in the brain. It's lightweight and wearable. It can be applied while the baby's awake, while they're moving around, which means we can study the infant brain in almost any environment, including the home or during natural play or while babies and parents interact, for example. In that swimming cap, there are a series of small hexagonal electronic sensor modules. Now, each of those modules emits and detects near-infrared light, some of which travels down to the brain and back again. So we can measure the change in how much light comes back to the surface of the scalp and infer from that changes in oxygenation in the brain. Our long-term hope is that this new generation of technologies will allow us to learn about how the healthy brain develops and ultimately use it to establish new ways of diagnosing and monitoring conditions when things do go wrong, so things like autism and cerebral palsy.