"As every proud parent knows, there's no such thing as too many images and videos you can take of your newborn," Professor Roy told a press conference.

"I think we're taking this to a whole new level."

Language difficulty

There is still a considerable amount of debate about how infants acquire language.

Although listening to the cooing of parents is thought to play an important part, most scientists believe it cannot be solely responsible for the rapid progress seen in most children.

Until now, the environmental influences on development have been very difficult to test because scientists have been unable to observe a baby for long enough in its home environment.

The Speechome Project will change that by generating and analysing vast tracts of recorded material.

For example, to understand how Professor Roy's son learnt his first words, the scientists will be able to mine their records to see who used those words around the child, where they were and what the child was doing at the time.

Frank Moss, director of MIT's Media Lab, believes the project has close parallels to the Human Genome Project.

"Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome Project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," he said.

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Big brother

The project started recording nine months ago when Professor Roy's newborn son left hospital.

Since then a "big brother" network of 14 microphones and 11 omni-directional cameras has been recording his son's waking hours.

It will be switched on for the next three years, by which time Professor Roy's son should be using complex language and spending more time outside, making recordings more difficult.

In case Professor Roy's family requires some privacy, every room is fitted with a PDA that can turn the microphones or cameras off.

An "oops" button allows people to erase the last few minutes of footage.

"You can type in how many minutes back in time you want to scrub permanently from the house's memory," said Professor Roy.

Personal video

After the data has been collected, it is temporarily stored at the house before being sent to a massive petabyte (one million gigabyte) disk storage system at the Media Lab at MIT.

There, both humans and computers are crunching the data to look for patterns.

However, Professor Roy is keen to stress that most images will never be seen by human eyes.

Other tools analyse speech patterns or show how people move through the different rooms in the house.

Together, the different systems will build a complete picture of all the stimuli that the infant experiences, allowing the model to "step into the shoes" of Professor Roy's son.

The team then hopes to build computers that can learn words and grammar, from hearing and seeing precisely the same images and sounds as the child, to understand the learning process in humans.

As well as these insights into language development, Professor Roy and his team believe the technology that has been developed for the project may also have applications in other fields such as personal video or analysing images from security cameras.

"There are numerous spin-off opportunities beyond the Speechome," he said.

At least one of these is the ultimate family album for his son when he grows up. But Professor Roy says that sitting through hours of baby photographs won't be a laugh a minute.

"Most of the recordings are pretty boring."