PC Software for Reviewing Child Development

Milestones will be a PC software product for recording and analyzing child development. The goals are to store information over time on the level of development of individual children in such areas as height, weight, gross motor skills, and language acquisition. Additional goals are to make available graphical and other tools for screening and comparing individual children, designated groups, and standard population groupings. Milestones should be useful to anyone who uses time-series and cross-sectional data on the development of groups of children or an individual child. This includes pediatricians, child psychiatrists, developmental markers beyond narrow communities of experts. Milestones will make user-friendly software available in the realm of child development. Milestones will enable more rigorous screenings than currently standard. Phase I will be used to survey, winnow, and consolidate existing developmental data, select areas of development for inclusion, decide upon the programming platform and method of approach, and to design an interface for user-friendly software. Phase II will then involve the actual creation of the software package.