Baby Grow

The Baby Grow project follows an extraordinary experiment revealing how the way infants wriggle, from birth, helps prepare their brains and bodies to navigate a complex physical and social world.

Did you know that meeting motor milestones is highly associated with neurotypical social and communication development?

Did you know that although motor differences and difficulties are not represented in the diagnostic criterion of autism, between 88% of individuals diagnosed with autism have a co-occurring motor condition?

The Baby Grow project is finding new, evidence-based, ways of assessing if a baby’s development is healthy. We’re seeking to reveal a much-needed early detection system for conditions such as autism.

Over 100 families have agreed to participate in our pioneering project at the University of Sussex.

For the first eight months, they film their babies in their own homes from the same angle, the camera looking down on the baby, who’s wearing a Baby Grow onesie and lying on a Baby Grow yoga mat — enabling our team to use AI software to analyse every twitch or fidget, kick and stretch.

Our project monitors these babies for the 30 months of their lives… exploring how their early movements are connected to their later social and communication abilities.

Meet the Team

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The Podcast and Video Documentary

Episode 1 — The First Eight Months

This podcast and video documentary are for anyone interested in how social and communication skills emerge over the first years of life, and explores whether the quality of a baby’s first movements can act as an early detection system for neurodevelopmental conditions like autism.

Join us for Episode 1 as we follow how parents are trained to capture key moments of their baby’s development over the first eight months of life in the comfort of their own homes. Meet the scientists using the latest technology to reveal key features of infant movements — which are now showing promise as an early autism screening tool. In this episode we get up close and personal with three of the Baby Grow project’s 100 families who have been working side-by-side with the scientists to provide the most detailed view of early child development ever reported.

Acknowledgements

This podcast episode was written and presented by [xxx], produced by Will Hood of The Academic Podcast Agency, funded by the Simons Foundation and with support from the University of Sussex.

This documentary episode was written and presented by [xxx], produced by Andrew Smith of Fleeting Year Films, funded by the Simons Foundation and with support from the University of Sussex.

Research and Recommended Sources

• BBC Reels
• University of Sussex (YouTube)
• Newsweek
• EI: SMART
• Me Human
• Prof Gilly Forrester — media site
• Prof Gilly Forrester — University of Sussex profile

Publications

Sotoodeh S, Ossmy O, Hall J, Rowan H, Donati G, Forrester GS (2026). Automatic Pose Estimation in Newborn Infants: Lessons from the Baby Grow Study, Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-02943-z

Ossmy O, Rowan H, Sotoodeh S, Hall J, Donati G, Forrester GS (2025). Frequent, Scalable and Global Use of “Intelligent Onesies” to Quantify Newborns’ Spontaneous Movements in Natural Settings, 54, IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL), Prague. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDL63968.2025.11204424

Ossmy O, Donati G, Kaur A, Sotoodeh MS, Forrester GS (2025). Towards automatic assessment of atypical early motor development? Brain Research Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresbull.2025.111311