Publication:

The digital milestone: exploring the relationship between smartphone use and developmental domains in children aged 1–5 years

Background In parallel with fast life-wide adoption of smartphones, even young children receive increased access to digital devices. With excessive screen time being a concern as it is, structured smartphone interactions can also bring fine-motor, behaviour-related, and language skills that reflect developmental progress. Objectives were to assess the association of developmental age with performance on smartphones across 12–60-month children, as well as to determine whether smartphone-based interactions can be used as a surrogate marker for developmental screening.

Methods Descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out on 24 children from 12–60 months of age in a tertiary healthcare facility in India. Developmental age was scored on four parameters fine motor, gross motor, behaviour, and language—based on milestone charts of Ghai essential pediatrics. Smartphone functioning was tested with ten standard interactive tasks. Associations of developmental age with scores on smartphone functioning were studied with Spearman's rank-order correlation test.

Results There was a highly significant and strong positive correlation with smartphone performance of tasks in all four fields of developmental stages (fine motor: ρ=0.958, p<0.001; gross motor: ρ=0.937, p<0.001; behavioral: ρ=0.949, p<0.001; language: ρ=0.926, p<0.001). Children with greater developmental maturity demonstrated greater proficiency on smartphones' performance of tasks.

Conclusion Smartphone interaction performance is significantly associated with young child developmental maturity. Basic smartphone-based tasks can be used as a low-cost adjunctive young child developmental screening tool in under-resourced settings. Multicentric larger trials are needed to confirm these results and create common digital assessment tools.