Dreams take flight
Empowering underprivileged children to soar with transdisciplinary efforts
Prof. Patrick Wong (left) and Prof. Si Chen (right) lead a project using AI and EEG for personalised early childhood cognitive development interventions.
Children growing up in Hong Kong’s subdivided flats or impoverished rural areas across the Chinese Mainland face a common challenge: a lack of high-quality cognitive stimulation during early development. This means they could miss the critical window for brain development, impacting their language, cognitive, and socio-emotional growth. To tackle this nationwide concern, Prof. Patrick Wong and Prof. Si Chen from CUHK’s Brain and Mind Institute are leading an innovative project aimed at early intervention in child development across Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland.
Scalable online training platform for caregivers
Among children in resource-scarce environments, 45% face developmental delays—not due to inherent special learning needs but insufficient quality interaction with caregivers. Many children in the Chinese Mainland begin life at a disadvantage, impacting their educational and career opportunities, ultimately weakening the nation’s human capital. Prof. Wong’s project supports infants up to three years old and their caregivers through a WeChat mini-programme delivering personalised training via low-cost neurological tests and AI. Training teams also offer on-site support to instructors, enabling scalable group guidance in under-resourced areas.
Recognising that personalised therapy is ideal but costly and difficult to scale, the team created an online platform with short videos of simple games and storytelling for caregivers to engage children at home, a powerful driver of natural language and cognitive development.
The initiative aims to reach 10,000 children, piloting with 1,000 of them from low-income and middle-class families in Hong Kong, as well as those from low-resource areas in the Chinese Mainland.
The WeChat mini-programme delivers online training to support caregivers in fostering effective interactions with their children.
(Photo courtesy of Prof. Wong and Prof. Chen)
Use of EEG and AI for interventions
A key element is the use of biodata through electroencephalography (EEG) to measure electrical activity in the brain, alongside behavioral and family socioeconomic data. This large database, fed into AI deep learning, predicts developmental trajectories and enables tailored interventions. For example, if EEG data shows weak speech responses from a child, personalised solutions will be recommended and interventions will be intensified to ensure resources are directed where they are needed most.
The project will investigate neural plasticity—how early stimulation reshapes the developing brain—seeking to understand why some interventions work better in specific contexts to inform future educational and social policies.
This groundbreaking effort, funded by a US$1.3 million grant from the Research Grants Council’s Areas of Excellence Scheme, unites cognitive neuroscientists, linguists, education specialists, and experts in economics, paediatrics, neuroscience, and bioinformatics in a transdisciplinary collaboration.
Prof. Chen’s earlier work on the ‘One Village, One Kindergarten’ programme demonstrated the importance of relatable, dialect-supported educational content in impoverished villages. The current programme supports multiple dialects, such as Cantonese and Sichuanese, enhanced with AI-assisted translation and lip-reading technology to aid less-educated parents. Parents only need five to 15 minutes daily to watch short videos to learn the interactive games and storytelling techniques.
Ensuring quality implementation and community trust
Ensuring high-quality implementation among all researchers across diverse sites is challenging. To maintain standards, the team established rigorous training, video evaluations, and regular meetings. They address parental concerns about EEG safety by demonstrating its harmlessness and gaining trust through local partners.
The team will engage an economist from CUHK to evaluate the study’s cost-effectiveness and impact on family income. Ultimately, the team plans to expand this project to developing countries in Southeast Asia. ‘This is not just educational intervention; it’s a social investment, Prof. Chan notes. ‘Our work is about giving every child a fair starting point.’
Adapted with modifications from the article published in the 23 October 2025 edition of CUHK in Focus.