Recruit & Schedule
DRDB coordinates participants, eligibility rules, study visits, reminders, and research team workflows.
Methodological Innovation for Developmental Science
We build tools that support recruitment, multimodal behavioral measurement, and reproducible analysis.
A software pipeline for research.
Together, these projects support the full research cycle from family recruitment to interpretable measures of attention and behavior.
Collect Behavioral Data
Expressions captures synchronized facial, movement, audio, and video data with consumer Apple devices.
Analyze Attention
iTemplate2 maps gaze data onto a shared facial template for heatmaps, quality control, and AOI analysis.
Research Software Ecosystem
Research operations
DRDB
Developmental Research Database
DRDB gives developmental research teams a shared operational record for recruitment, family participation history, eligibility, scheduling, staffing, and follow-up across studies.
Research operations
Participant continuity
Recruitment oversight
Visit scheduling
Team workflows
06 - Communication flow
Keep the follow-up moving.
Dashboard summary for recruitment status and system updates. Reminder and templated communication tools help turn a scheduled visit into a consistent, trackable next step.
Why it matters
Research programs stay coherent as people and studies change.
A shared system helps preserve operational knowledge that can otherwise become scattered across individual inboxes, spreadsheets, and short-term staff handoffs.
What it unlocks
Longitudinal family follow-up
Carry prior participation and contact history forward to support eligibility decisions, follow-up timing, and future study planning.
Cross-lab coordination
Give distributed teams a shared view of participant relationships, schedules, and study activity when research is not all in one place.
Growing study portfolios
Make recruitment progress, staffing needs, visit planning, and study workflows easier to review across an expanding program.
Less routine coordination
Reminder emails, follow-up, calendar sync, and templates reduce repetitive manual work.
Flexible deployment
Supports local lab use as well as institutionally hosted research environments.
Continuity through change
Keeps essential operational context available across staff transitions and changing research conditions.
recruitment
eligibility logic
scheduling
reminders
Mobile behavioral sensing
Expressions
Infant Behavior Research Platform
Expressions makes high-density behavioral research more feasible for infants and children by linking facial expression, movement, audio, video, and event data without asking young participants to wear specialized equipment.
Signals captured
Expression
Movement
Audio + video
Task events
Demo video for the mobile sensing workflow. Playback starts only when visitors choose to play it.
Why it matters
More natural measurement, with less burden on young participants.
By keeping sensing lightweight and closer to everyday interaction, Expressions can support studies that would be difficult to run with specialized, wearable, or highly intrusive systems.
What it unlocks
Child-friendly expression studies
Follow facial and movement signals during play-based tasks without adding wearable equipment to the experience.
Caregiver-child interaction
Coordinate more than one device to study interactions from complementary viewpoints and timepoints.
Time-locked experiments
Link behavioral change to stimuli and tasks through synchronized event markers and experiment-control workflows.
On-device first
Supports privacy-sensitive approaches for child-focused research.
Works with existing studies
Connects to established experiment-control and local-network workflows.
One synchronized record
Aligns multimodal recordings and task events in a common workflow.
ARKit sensing
audio-video sync
event markers
multi-device studies
Eye-tracking analysis
iTemplate2
Dynamic Face Eye-Tracking Analysis
iTemplate2 registers gaze data from face images and videos to a common facial template, making feature-level attention easier to compare when faces move, change expression, or appear in more naturalistic scenes.
Analysis scope
Dynamic faces
Gaze registration
Face landmarks
Feature-level AOIs
Why it matters
Face analysis that keeps up when the stimulus moves.
Frame-wise gaze-to-template mapping helps replace fixed AOIs that break down when faces rotate, deform, change expression, or share the screen with other faces.
What it unlocks
Dynamic video tasks
Analyze moving, expressive faces instead of limiting studies to static and highly controlled images.
Naturalistic gaze studies
Support screen-based video and wearable eye-tracking workflows within the same face-centered framework.
Inspectable feature analysis
Use visual overlays, heatmaps, and anatomically grounded AOIs to make feature-level results easier to inspect.
Automated at scale
MediaPipe landmarks and multi-face tools reduce repeated manual AOI work.
Reproducible by design
An open-source Python workflow supports transparent, reusable analysis steps.
Beyond gaze alone
The manuscript describes optional links to facial expression and head-pose dynamics.
landmark detection
template mapping
heatmaps
AOI analysis
Software built around developmental research.
Each tool starts from a concrete methodological limitation: families are hard to schedule, infant behavior is hard to measure, and dynamic faces are hard to analyze.
Research-first design
Build for real study constraints, not abstract software demos.
Workflow integration
Support recruitment, collection, analysis, and team coordination together.
Multimodal measurement
Combine behavioral, video, audio, gaze, and participant metadata.
Reproducible analysis
Use structured outputs, quality checks, and documented processing steps.
Interested in these tools?
For access, collaboration, documentation, or project-specific questions, contact the lab and tell us which tool you are interested in.