2019/06/05 by Xiaofei Huang, Huang, Xiaofei, Alaina Martens +4
Computer Science · Health Professions · Neuroscience · #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Hand Gesture Recognition Systems #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Infant Health and Development #Tactile and Sensory Interactions #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1906.01821
openalex publication_date 2019/06/05 · openalex created_date 2019/06/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Non-nutritive sucking (NNS) is defined as the sucking action that occurs when a finger, pacifier, or other object is placed in the baby's mouth, but there is no nutrient delivered. In addition to providing a sense of safety, NNS even can be regarded as an indicator of infant's central nervous system development. The rich data, such as sucking frequency, the number of cycles, and their amplitude during baby's non-nutritive sucking is important clue for judging the brain development of infants or preterm infants. Nowadays most researchers are collecting NNS data by using some contact devices such as pressure transducers. However, such invasive contact will have a direct impact on the baby's natural sucking behavior, resulting in significant distortion in the collected data. Therefore, we propose a novel contact-less NNS data acquisition and quantification scheme, which leverages the facial landmarks tracking technology to extract the movement signals of baby's jaw from recorded baby's sucking video. Since completion of the sucking action requires a large amount of synchronous coordination and neural integration of the facial muscles and the cranial nerves, the facial muscle movement signals accompanying baby's sucking pacifier can indirectly replace the NNS signal. We have evaluated our method on videos collected from several infants during their NNS behaviors and we have achieved the quantified NNS patterns closely comparable to results from visual inspection as well as contact-based sensor readings.