In a few government schools spread across the urban and rural mandals in Warangal, a slow and steady change is underway. An open source, single-file, browser-based psychophysical battery named DyscalcBattery is assessing the cognitive substrates of developmental dyscalculia in school-age children. Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that disrupts a person’s ability to understand numbers and math-related concepts. This tool empowers researchers to ask questions that no existing open instrument can answer, bridging the gap between basic-science research and accessible clinical screening.
Developed by Dr Rakesh Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Psychology, SIAS, Krea University and Usha Padmini, SR University, Warangal, DyscalcBattery is changing the way dyscalculia screeners work in the country. This battery is designed for field deployment in low-resource and multilingual settings, schools without reliable internet, laptops without admin privileges, researchers without licensing budgets. This project addresses a major gap in learning disability research, where most widely used dyscalculia screeners are proprietary commercial products that require
The Spark and the Genesis
The inspiration to build DyscalcBattery arose from the evident gap between advanced computational cognitive science and the everyday tools available for clinical screening. Over years, Dr Sengupta’s computational modelling and experimental work in the field of numerical cognition has refined how we understand numerosity perception, but conventional screeners simply aren’t designed to capture the detailed, trial-by-trial behavioural data needed for this kind of mechanistic modelling.
First of its Kind
DyscalcBattery is novel in the way that existing normative screening instruments are overwhelmingly calibrated using data from European and North American children. Current proprietary tools are not adapted for non-Western, non-English-medium populations, which usually forces researchers here to rely on fragmented, unpublished local adaptations. DyscalcBattery provides a standardised platform specifically designed to handle the multilingual and culturally variable contexts of Indian classrooms, and it is driving the first dyscalculia prevalence study of its kind in a South Indian population.
Speaking on the need of such a tool for democratised data access and impact, Dr Sengupta added, “Commercial paywalls make the tools essentially unavailable for research groups or educators operating in low-resource settings. By releasing DyscalcBattery under a highly permissive open-source MIT license, the team allows anyone globally to use, modify, and distribute the tool entirely for free. Furthermore, its offline, browser-based architecture completely bypasses the deployment failures usually caused by the intermittent network connectivity found in rural field settings.”
Inside the Lab
The team built DyscalcBattery using JavaScript and the jsPsych framework to run entirely within a standard web browser. The lab engineered it as a single, self-contained HTML file that requires zero installation, no server backend, and no internet connection after the initial load. The team programmed seven distinct psychophysical tasks into the software, ranging from simple reaction times to complex non-symbolic quantity comparisons involving dots, objects, and shapes. The lab also developed custom stimulus generation algorithms, such as canvas drawing routines that dynamically prevent objects from overlapping on the screen, ensuring clean data collection.
DyscalcBattery also prioritises privacy and data security by securely exporting trial-level data directly to the user’s local machine, ensuring that no participant data ever leaves the local computer.
Future Forward
As part of the pilot, the fieldwork in Warangal is being conducted collaboratively with Dr Sengupta’s PhD student Usha Padmini from SR University, with the cooperation of participating school principals. The team is testing children directly on low-end laptops and tablets to prove the efficacy of the offline architecture in real-world, low-resource environments. In the near future, it will serve as the core foundational instrument for a multi-site Registered Report looking at the cognitive phenotype of dyscalculia specifically in Indian children.