Infant Screening System Based on Cry Analysis

Acoustical investigation of infant cries has been a clinical and research focus in the recent years. Findings of several studies reveal the importance of cry as a useful window for early detection of several diseases and communication difficulties such as hearing impairment, intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy etc. This motivates us to use a minimal interface system that can automatically classify infant cries into normal and pathological with the help of state-of-the-art machine learning strategies. In this paper, we propose a software program for screening infants based on their cries. The proposed system is able to detect & classify infant cries into normal and pathological based on the acoustic input. To build and train the system, infant cries of normal and Low Birth Weight (LBW) newborn within 7 days of birth were considered. A pain induced cry elicited using the routine intramuscular immunization was recorded using a standard Olympus LS-100 recorder which was held about 10 centimetres away from the infant’s mouth. The acoustic correlates of these cries were used to build the software tool. Artificial Neural Network was employed to improve its functionality. Therefore, we propose a screening tool for further accessibility and large-scale implementation.