Abstract
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.
Abstract (translated)
非营养性吮吸（nns）是指当手指、奶嘴或其他物体放在婴儿嘴里时发生的吮吸动作，但没有提供营养。除了提供安全感外，神经网络甚至可以被视为婴儿中枢神经系统发育的一个指标。婴儿非营养性吮吸时的吮吸频率、周期数、幅度等丰富的数据是判断婴儿或早产儿大脑发育的重要线索。目前，大多数研究人员正在使用压力传感器等接触设备来收集NNS数据。然而，这种侵入性接触将直接影响婴儿的自然吮吸行为，从而导致收集到的数据发生严重失真。因此，我们提出了一种新颖的无接触NNS数据采集与量化方案，利用面部标志物跟踪技术从记录的婴儿吮吸视频中提取婴儿下颌的运动信号。由于吸吮动作的完成需要大量的面部肌肉与颅神经的同步协调和神经整合，因此婴儿吸吮奶嘴所伴随的面部肌肉运动信号可以间接取代NNS信号。我们对从几名婴儿的NNS行为中收集的视频评估了我们的方法，我们获得了量化的NNS模式，与视觉检查和基于接触的传感器读数的结果极为相似。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01821
