Moving an Entire Generation of Children up the Cognitive Curve

RAPTbaby™ is RVI’s children’s division. Using more than two decades of clinically validated research, it creates products that support the development of young brains, focusing on auditory processing and language formation. Our intent is to put the power of leading edge developmental neuroscience into the hands of parents and caregivers who can, for the first time, use it to deliver cognitive benefits to the children in their care.

Bringing Neuroscience Into the Nursery

Babies don’t enter the world ready to speak or read. In fact, their brains have to undergo an enormous amount of development – building connections among certain brain cells or neurons, pruning others – to create the fundamental systems and capabilities that allow a young child (and later adult) to acquire and process language. Developmental cognitive neuroscience – the study of how the brain builds itself – is a relatively new branch of science which, thanks to the greater use of lab tools like functional MRI, MEG and EEGs that allow real-time non-invasive observation of young brains in action, is producing enormously important work on what can go right and wrong in a young brain.

How Babies Become Language Learners

RAPTbaby’s launch products are designed to help babies perform one of their most important jobs – setting up their brains to learn and use language. The infant brain is enormously plastic, highly responsive to outside stimuli that participate in shaping the brain areas critical to acquiring the native language spoken in its environment.

Setting up the brain’s language circuity (its acoustic or linguistic map) requires the infant to focus on rapidly occurring acoustic cues that differentiate individual speech sounds using the baby’s Rapid Auditory Processing (RAP) ability. The quality of those acoustic cues and the baby’s RAP have a significant impact on how proficient a language processor the baby will be – not just in childhood but throughout life.

RAPTbaby Products

Smarter Sleep Sound Soother

Unlike most sound machines, Smarter Sleep was designed with the recognition that even while babies are sleeping, their brains are active.  The Smarter Sleep sound machine incorporates patented auditory sequences into soothing melodic and other background tracks to help the infant brain do its job of paying attention to environmental sound changes while the baby sleeps, allowing the infant to become more proficient at the rapid auditory processing that is so vital to the development of the brain’s linguistic circuitry. By providing that experience, the Smarter Sleep soother is more supportive of brain development than sound devices which are not designed to encourage the brain to pay attention to sound changes and potentially limit the very important brain-building the baby should be engaging in, even at night.

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RAPT AABy™ (in development)

An in-the-home, child-friendly training “robot”, RAPT AABy™ is designed to optimize a child’s RAP skills, using RAPT™, a patented algorithmically structured audio-visual experience that helps an infant become more attentive to, and faster at, processing minute changes in sounds. Peer-reviewed clinical studies demonstrate that babies exposed to RAPT for 8 to 10 minutes a week for six weeks achieve processing speeds more than twice as fast as untrained babies, at levels associated with materially better later language and reading scores and superior lifelong cognitive outcomes. RAPT AABy not only replicates the lab training but, because the baby can use it at home multiple times during the week, provides even more opportunity to help the baby’s brain build its attentional and processing skills.