Our Vision:
Early detection of learning delay for all children
The problem we are solving
Traditional assessments are heavily reliant on the child’s ability to understand instructions and so often are testing language ability, not cognitive ability or what psychologists call “executive function”.
Most of these assessments have been standardised in English speaking populations and so are difficult to interpret in children whose mother tongue is not English.
Most public health screening programs rely on parental questionnaires. These questionnaires are influenced by parent’s knowledge of their child, and are focused on developmental milestones.
The academic team behind Liltoda have developed CogniTOT to solve these problems and to improve the early detection of learning difficulties.
Since 2014 we have studied how children interact with touchscreen devices and touchscreen tasks. These tasks are language free and scoring is independent of the administrator, improving inter-rater reliability and providing robust and targeted assessment.
Who We Are
Liltoda is an academic spin out company from the INFANT Centre at University College Cork, Ireland.
We are a multidisciplinary team, led by Professor Deirdre Murray (CEO), a consultant paediatrician, and key opinion leader in early brain development and with over 15 years of clinical research experience, finding better ways to predict outcome following early brain injury.
Since 2014, our research has focused on understanding how young children interact with touchscreen devices and how this interaction can be used to measure early executive function.
We teamed up with Hello Games to harness the power of gaming technology to solve this problem and to develop assessments that are engaging and age-appropriate for toddlers. The result of all this was a touchscreen Cognitive Assessment application called BabyScreen was then used in clinical research studies for a number of years; and the publications listed below outline its development.
In 2020, BabyScreen was expanded to create CogniTOT. CogniTOT is a touchscreen application that is clinically proven to detect learning delay in children aged 22-30 months, and is built on top of BabyScreen.
Our Team
Prof Deirdre Murray - CEO
MB BAO BcH, FRCPi, FPAED, PhD
I am a consultant paediatrician, the Chair of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, University College Cork. For almost two decades my research has focused on early brain injury and on finding better ways to predict outcome following early brain injury. This work led our team to recognise that current methods of diagnosing cognitive delay are heavily language focussed and subjective. In many cases, mild or moderate delay will go undetected until school age, beyond the window of early intervention. Since 2014 my research team have focused on understanding how young children interact with touchscreen devices and how this interaction can be harnessed to measure early executive function.
I am the lead for Paediatric Research in the INFANT centre: www.infantcentre.ie. Liltoda is the first academic spin-out company of the INFANT centre and is one of many academic companies to come from the research of University College Cork.
A full list of my publications can be seen here: https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/298284/overview
Mike Cunneen - CTO
BSc. Business Information Systems, UCC
I am an experienced health app developer, UX designer, technical product owner/integrator with both 6 years in startups and building software in paediatric clinical research.
Since 2008, I have been building innovative web and mobile applications to solve real-world health problems, with a big focus on excellent User Experience (UX) design and reducing the friction for our users. I am delighted to take all this experience and learning and apply it to what we do at Liltoda.
Mairead Murray - Co-founder
BSc, HDip, MSc
I am a Clinical Research Project Manager with over 12 years of experience in paediatrics. I have managed academic, industry led, single centre, multi-centre, international, non-regulated and regulated trials and clinical investigations.
My experience is in the delivery of research projects, from initial scoping through to budget and contract negotiation. I specialise in research governance, including ethics, and competent authorities compliance.
My interest is the delivery of paediatric research that will change healthcare and improve outcomes for children.
Sean Murray
Founder & Managing Director, Hello Games, Guildford, UK
Hello Games and its subsidiary Hello Labs has worked with the researchers of the Liltoda Lab to develop the CogniTOT and BabyScreen applications. Incorporating the best of gaming technology to solve a real problem for researchers studying early brain development. Until now it was really hard to separate language skills from early problem solving abilities. CogniTOT has been developed to address this problem.
Read more about Hello Games here https://hellogames.org/