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Infant Growth Charts in WolframAlpha

A bit over a month ago I was searching for infant growth charts because I was concerned my daughter wasn't gaining weight sufficiently. At our previous check-up our pediatrician told us she had dropped 1 standard deviation on the standard growth curves since the last visit.

It was nothing to be overly concerned about. Weight gain rates fluctuate in the early months of an infant's life. Nonetheless, as a new father I was anxious to see how well she was doing a few weeks later when my wife had her weighed at a local group for new mothers.

I used Google to search for growth charts. It returned a bunch of interactive tools, many of which did not work well or were difficult to interpret. The PDF files on the CDC site were useful, but excruciating to find.

Flash-forward several weeks later. My daughter's weight is doing fine; our pediatrician had already verified that at our subsequent visit. But I was fooling around with WolframAlpha, trying to find some interesting data beyond what percentage of the population is named "Tom". On a whim I typed in "infant growth" and found exactly what I had been looking for a month back: a concise and easy-to-interpret answer to the question of what percentile my daughter was in based on her age and weight according to the standard growth curve.

WolframAlpha defaulted the data to the set appropriate for a 12-month old, but it was easy to change via a simple input box at the top of the page. And while the small version of the growth plots were a bit tricky to read, the distribution charts where nice and clear. The best part was the accompanying data tables that showed the median weight, as well as the range one and two standard deviations out.

Infant Growth Distribution

WolframAlpha has received a lot of flak for not being useful outside of a small realm of users. A lot of that is justified - for now. When used with the expectation of a conventional search engine, you're much more likely to find irrelevant or no results than anything useful. But if you want to ask a somewhat arcane, data-driven question - like how many seconds old you are - WolframAlpha does produce results.