In the United States, millions of young children under five years of age attend childcare. Research has demonstrated the critical importance of emotionally supportive caregivers and stimulating learning environments as the early experiences that affect later health, learning and well-being. But monitoring childcare facilities to identify these experiences is time- and resource-intensive. This makes it difficult to identify the quality of most childcare settings. Increasing the quality of many childcare environments in the United States would better promote children’s healthy development. This project will use a sensor-based system that measures traits of the physical and social environments of childcare settings. These traits affect children’s language development and physical activity, two key elements of young children’s development. This project, and subsequent work that builds upon it, will lead to new insights in both technological application and integration of sensors, as well as theories of child development. University researchers will partner with a community-wide intervention group, childcare providers, and parents on the development of a sensor-based system designed to provide childcare providers with rapid and direct feedback focused on various child-environment interactions and dimensions. Beyond scientific advances, the results have the potential to help address and improve quality in childcare, which may benefit millions of young children and their families. Ultimately, these efforts can benefit society through improved quality of care and thus enriched developmental outcomes for young children. The project will also contribute to knowledge of engagement of community partners in the design and implementation of technological systems to improve community well-being.

The proposed project will examine the feasibility of a smart and connected childcare community through a sensor-based system used to evaluate physical characteristics of childcare settings. This project will contribute to a larger body of work that furthers scientific progress in four ways. This project will: (1) design smart childcare communities by developing novel sensor technology to generate useful and actionable information, while integrating heterogeneous network and advanced computing approaches; (2) optimize the deployment of smart sensing in childcare communities to obtain useful and actionable information without compromising the privacy requirements and objectives essential for monitoring active spaces; (3) develop an efficient communication and computing framework for feedback loops in smart and connected childcare, using an edge-assisted childcare data fusion approach to analyze information from sensors; and (4) lay the groundwork for a research program that will contribute to new theories and related measures of child development and childcare quality. The project anticipate enhanced descriptions of context-specific childcare quality that will provide a mechanism for ongoing feedback to childcare providers and communities at-large. Work through the planning grant will inform the development of a longer-term research program that addresses the impact of sensor-based measurement of provider behavior and quality of young children’s learning environments. Ultimately, the resultant smart and connected childcare community can improve young children’s development and learning, enhancing understanding of how built environments affect human health.