Wellstart Child Development Tracker

The arrival of a first child a life-changing event for anyone.

But hand-in-hand with the joy come immeasurable amounts of fear – what do you do next?

If Wellstart has its way, you'll hand the company a tenner for its child-development-tracking software.

The idea is that rather than constantly bothering grandparents for advice, or making endless calls to the assigned health visitor, PC-owning new parents can install the Child Development Tracker program and turn to it for help any time of the day.

It also provides a journal function, so that key milestones in youngsters' development can be recorded – from in-utero ultrasound scans and videos of the birth to photos of the child's first day at school.

These photos and videos are plotted on a calendar alongside a stream of reminders and expected milestones drawn from Wellstart's own database. So, come his or her second birthday, for example, the Wellstart program will remind you that the child's vocabulary is expected to have grown to at least 15 words. In between times, the program will dish up reminders for recommend vaccinations, weigh-ins and measurements.

This is all very handy and certainly the kind of thing that could benefit busy mums and dads. The advice is also written and presented by practising GPs, which is laudable.

However, Wellstart is let down by a lack of attention to detail. During setup, for example, the program asks for the child's gender, but it didn't appear to do anything with this information. It continued to precede various milestones and reminders with the likes of "If your child is a girl..."

Also, Wellstart suffers from one serious omission – it offers no way to export the child's development data. Other than the ability to post things to Facebook, the stored photos, videos and sound clips cannot be extracted from Wellstart. This flaw alone is sufficient to make us hesitate from recommending Wellstart.

Moreover, the program does not have a built-in backup facility: the online support pages suggest parents regularly back up a particular data folder on the PC's hard disk but the instructions for doing this were poor.