The association of a novel digital tool for assessment of early childhood cognitive development, 'DEvelopmental assessment on an E-Platform (DEEP)', with growth in rural India: A proof of concept study.

backgroundThere is an urgent need to fill the gap of scalable cognitive assessment tools for preschool children to enable identification of children at-risk of sub-optimal development and to support their timely referral into interventions. We present the associations between growth in early childhood, a well-established marker of cognitive development, and scores on a novel digital cognitive assessment tool called DEvelopmental Assessment on an E-Platform (DEEP) on a sample of 3-year old pre-schoolers from a rural region in north India.

methodsBetween February 2018 and March 2019, 1359 children from the Sustainable Programme Incorporating Nutrition and Games (SPRING) programme were followed up at 3-years age and data on DEEP, anthropometry and a clinical developmental assessment, the Bayley's Scale of Infant and Toddler Development, 3rd edition (BSID-III) was collected. DEEP data from 200 children was used to train a machine learning algorithm to predict their score on the cognitive domain of BSID-III. The DEEP score of the remaining 1159 children was then predicted using this algorithm to examine the cross-sectional and prospective association of growth with the DEEP score.

findingsThe magnitude of the concurrent positive association between height-for-age and cognitive

interpretationIn this study, we suggest the utility of DEEP, a scalable, digital cognitive assessment tool, to measure cognition in preschool children. Further validation in different and larger datasets is necessary to confirm our findings.

fundingThe SPRING Programme was funded through a Wellcome Trust programme grant and the follow-up study by the Corporate Social Responsibility initiative grant from Madura Microfinance Ltd.