SENDD
SENDD is a Croatian AI service that screens infants aged 1.5 to 3.5 months for early neurodevelopmental deviations. Parents film their baby's spontaneous movements at home, upload the clips, and receive an assessment report by email.
What is SENDD?
SENDD stands for System for Early Neurological Deviation Detection. It is an artificial intelligence service that screens babies for early signs of neurodevelopmental problems by analysing video of how they move on their own.
The method behind it is not new. During the first three months of life an infant's spontaneous motor repertoire is dominated by what clinicians call fidgety movements. Research over roughly the last thirty years established that it is the quality of these movements, not their quantity, that carries diagnostic and prognostic weight: a healthy brain keeps producing varied, complex movement, while movement that is uniform or stereotyped points to possible motor deviation later on. What SENDD adds is the ability to capture this at home on a smartphone and then process it computationally.
In practice a parent films the baby lying on its back, lightly dressed, from a bird's eye view, and uploads at least three clips of two to three minutes each. The system annotates key points on the child's body, and neural networks trained on this kind of footage recognise the movement patterns. Results are expressed on the Hadders-Algra classification with four categories: normal-optimal, normal-suboptimal, mildly abnormal and abnormal.
Three processing models are offered. The first produces an assessment from the AI system alone and returns two broad outcomes within 48 hours. The second adds a trained human expert working with AI support and returns the four-category classification within ten days. The third is a visual clinical assessment by two experts alongside the AI system, returned within five days. The eligible age window is narrow: 1.5 to 3.5 months, ideally two to three months, using corrected age for premature babies.
The service is run jointly from Zagreb by TIS Grupa d.o.o., an ICT company active since 1995, and the Polyclinic Sabol for Children's Diseases, Croatia's first private paediatric practice. It grew out of a project co-financed by the European structural and investment fund and won a VIDI Awards 2024 innovation prize. The terms of use are explicit that the output is not a definitive diagnosis.
What it does
- Analyses video of an infant's spontaneous fidgety movements to flag possible neurodevelopmental deviations
- Classifies movement quality using the Hadders-Algra system, from normal-optimal to abnormal
- Annotates key points on the child's body to recognise movement patterns automatically
- Delivers a written assessment report by email within 48 hours, 5 days or 10 days depending on the model chosen
- Checks every uploaded clip against technical and child-condition requirements before assessment
- Combines automated scoring with review by one or two trained human experts
- Lets parents manage several children, medical documents and consents from a single account
When to use SENDD / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if SENDD is the right fit.
When to use SENDD
- Parents and guardians of an infant aged 1.5 to 3.5 months who want early neurodevelopmental screening without a clinic visit
- Families of at-risk newborns, including premature babies, for whom corrected age is used to time the recording
- Paediatricians and paediatric neurologists who already work with the general movements assessment method
- Paediatric physiotherapists and occupational therapists involved in early intervention
- Researchers in computer vision and infant motor development, for whom the platform provides a dedicated researcher role
When not to use SENDD
- Anyone seeking a definitive diagnosis: the terms of use state the result is not one
- Parents of babies outside the 1.5 to 3.5 month window, for whom the method does not apply
- Families whose baby cannot be filmed calm, awake and undisturbed, since crying or resisting makes assessment impossible
- Under-18s, who cannot open an account at all
- Anyone unwilling to have their child's video used to train neural networks, since consent cannot be split
How to use SENDD
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Register on the SENDD website or in the mobile app; you must be at least 18 years old
- Confirm your email address using the link sent to you before you can sign in
- Enter your own details as parent or guardian, then add the child's data including birth date and expected birth date if premature
- Upload the child's medical documentation, such as the maternity hospital discharge letter
- Read the technical and child-condition requirements before filming
- Film the baby awake, calm and lightly dressed, lying on the back on a flat surface, from directly above with all limbs in frame
- Record three to four separate clips of two to three minutes, keeping the camera steady and the background plain
- Choose one of the processing models offered before sending the videos
- Upload the clips and wait for each one to pass the technical and medical checks
- Receive the assessment report by email in your chosen language, English or Croatian
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Completely non-invasive: the baby is simply filmed at home, with no stress or travel
- Built on a clinical method that has been studied and published for around thirty years
- Three service levels, from AI-only screening to a double reading by two clinicians
- Unusually thorough legal documentation, with separate consent forms for the child and the parent
- A named data protection officer with a dedicated contact address
- Genuine, actively maintained iOS and Android apps, last updated in June 2026
- Interface and reports available in both English and Croatian
Cons
- The public website is entirely in Croatian, and its English language switcher does not actually work
- No price is published anywhere on the public site; amounts only appear after registration
- Two of the six legal documents, including the payment terms, return a server error
- The child's videos are used to train neural networks and consent cannot be given selectively
- No hosting country is named, and the consent forms and the policy contradict each other on transfers outside the EU
- A very narrow eligibility window of 1.5 to 3.5 months leaves little room for a second attempt
- No list of subprocessors is published, and there is no LinkedIn or YouTube presence to cross-check
Pricing & Plans
No price is published on the public website. The service section of the home page describes what is offered without stating any amount, and the payment terms document linked from the legal page returns a server error. The terms of use make clear that the service is paid: it is carried out after successful payment for the model selected. Amounts only become visible after registration, on the model selection screen. Figures held in the application itself indicate 150 EUR for the assisted model and 250 EUR for the clinical model, with a 50 percent reduction applied, while the entry-level model carries a hard-coded value that is never displayed. Because none of this is confirmed by any published source, no starting price is stated here. At the time of review the vendor's own payment switch was returning false, meaning checkout was disabled. There is no free trial and no permanent free plan.
- assessment produced by the specialised artificial intelligence system alone
- returning two outcome categories
- normal movements or a recommendation for further assessment
- report emailed within 48 hours
- assessment by an expert trained in spontaneous motor skills working with AI support
- returning the four-category Hadders-Algra classification and recommendations for further tests if needed
- report emailed within 10 days
- joint visual clinical assessment by two experts alongside an assessment by the AI system
- returning the four-category Hadders-Algra classification
- report emailed within 5 days
- In every model the stated turnaround begins only once a third video meeting the technical and child conditions has been submitted
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how SENDD handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is documented in detail. A full personal data protection policy is published in Croatian at sendd.eu/privacy and in English as a downloadable document, stating that it ensures an adequate level of protection in accordance with the GDPR. It sets out the processing principles, the lawful bases, and the rights to erasure, access, rectification, portability, objection and restriction, with a one-month response deadline extendable by two months. A data protection officer is appointed, acts independently and reports to management. Data protection impact assessments are foreseen for high-risk processing and special categories. The named supervisory authority is the Croatian AZOP. The applications offer a full data export and an account deletion request completed within thirty days. Croatian law applies and Zagreb courts have jurisdiction.
Who owns the data?
The terms state that personal data remains the property of the individual it describes. Two Croatian entities share the roles: TIS Grupa d.o.o. and the Polyclinic Sabol for Children's Diseases. The child consent form names TIS Grupa as data controller and the polyclinic as processor; the parent consent form and the data protection policy reverse those roles. Access is limited to the polyclinic's medical staff and TIS Grupa's technical staff. A named data protection officer, Matija Ivakic, can be reached at privacy@sendd.eu. After an account is deactivated the providers may keep using de-identified data, which they describe as fully anonymised or pseudonymised.
Reuse rights
Users keep control of what they upload rather than granting the providers a broad licence. The terms state that videos, medical documents, photographs and comments will not be used in advertising, promotional material, presentations, events, television or websites anywhere in the world without the user's prior consent, and that usage rights will not be passed to any third party, subsidiary or affiliate without that consent either. In the other direction, users may not copy, reproduce, modify, distribute or republish anything from the website or the applications, and commercial reuse is expressly forbidden without written permission. Processing rests on consent, which the child consent form lists as covering neural network training, and that consent is a precondition for using the service at all.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
No hosting country or region is named anywhere on the site. The consent forms say only that personal data is stored on a server in a certified data centre, given as an example as ISO/IEC 27001 certified for enterprise cloud services or equivalent, which describes the hosting provider rather than SENDD. Those same forms state that personal data will not be transferred to third countries. The data protection policy contradicts this: its article on portability foresees transfers to third countries or international organisations where the conditions are met, subject to additional controls such as legally binding instruments, binding corporate rules or certification. The terms of use add that medical data and records are held on secure, encrypted servers maintained by the providers. The website itself is delivered through Cloudflare, whose anycast address geolocates to the United States, but that concerns content delivery and says nothing about where the videos are stored. Jurisdiction is Croatian, with Zagreb courts competent.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting SENDD.
- Videos of your child, along with visible biometric features, are used to train neural networks, and consent to this cannot be separated from consent to use the service
- No hosting country is named, and the consent forms state data will not leave the EU while the data protection policy allows transfers to third countries with safeguards
- Two of the six legal documents on the legal page, the data protection policy and the payment terms, return a server error and cannot be read
- The legal page dates its documents to August 2023 while the downloadable terms say they apply from September 2024, so it is unclear which version binds you
- The ISO 27001 reference in the consent forms describes the hosting data centre, hedged as an example or equivalent, and is not a certification held by SENDD itself
- A screening result is easy to over-read in either direction: a reassuring report is not a clean bill of health, and a flagged one is not a diagnosis
- The narrow 1.5 to 3.5 month window means a rejected batch of videos may leave little time to film again
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Getting started is easy; filming well is the hard part. There is nothing to install beyond the mobile app, and registration only requires a captcha and email confirmation. The stated requirements are ordinary: a standard computer, internet access, email, a current browser and the ability to read PDFs. The real effort lies in the recording itself, which must be shot from directly above, well lit without harsh contrast, against a plain background, with a steady camera and a baby who is awake, calm and undisturbed. Non-compliant clips are rejected and must be filmed again.
Deployment
Apps stores
Supported languages
Behind SENDD
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
At what age should I film my baby?
How many videos do I need to send?
Does SENDD give a diagnosis?
Which languages are supported?
Is there a mobile app?
How old do I have to be to open an account?
Will my child's videos be used to train the AI?
Can I refuse that training and still use the service?
How do I delete my account and my data?
Who actually operates SENDD?
Should you pick SENDD?
SENDD is a narrow, serious tool rather than a general-purpose product. It applies a recognised clinical method, the general movements assessment, to video that parents can shoot at home, and it is backed by a real paediatric practice as well as an established ICT company. The three service levels are sensibly designed, moving from pure automation to a double reading by two clinicians, and the platform is honest that its output is not a diagnosis. Legal documentation is far more thorough than is usual at this scale, with separate consent forms, a named data protection officer and a clearly stated supervisory authority.
The reservations are real, however. Pricing is nowhere to be found on the public site, the payment terms document does not load, and the vendor's own payment switch was turned off at the time of review, which makes the commercial state of the service hard to read. The child's videos are used to train neural networks and consent to that cannot be separated from consent to use the service at all, which parents deserve to weigh carefully. No hosting country is named, and the consent forms and the data protection policy do not agree on whether data may leave the EU. Finally, the public site is Croatian only, despite a language switcher that suggests otherwise and an application that is genuinely bilingual.
For a family in Croatia with a baby in the right age window, and for clinicians already familiar with the method, SENDD is a credible and unusually well-documented option. Anyone else should read the consent forms closely first.
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