New tool helps analyse baby’s crying for health problems
Scientists have developed a new computer-based tool
that analyses the cries of babies, searching for clues to potential health
or developmental problems.
Subtle acoustic features of a cry, many of
them imperceptible to the human ear, can hold important
information about a baby’s health, researchers said.
A team of researchers from Brown University and Women
& Infants Hospital of Rhode Island has developed a
new computer-based tool to perform finely tuned acoustic analyses of
babies’ cries.
The team hopes their baby cry analyser will lead to
new ways for researchers and clinicians to use cry in
identifying children with neurological problems or developmental disorders.
Reuters
Slight variations in cries, mostly imperceptible to
the human ear, can be a ‘window into the brain’ that could allow for
early intervention, researchers said.
“There are lots of conditions that might manifest
in differences in cry acoustics. For instance, babies with
birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in
pregnancy or birth or babies who are extremely premature can have ongoing medical effects,” said Stephen Sheinkopf, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown, who helped develop the new tool.
pregnancy or birth or babies who are extremely premature can have ongoing medical effects,” said Stephen Sheinkopf, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behaviour at Brown, who helped develop the new tool.
“Cry analysis can be a noninvasive way to get
a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological
and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies,” he said.
The system operates in two phases. During the first
phase, the analyser separates recorded cries into
12.5-millisecond frames. Each frame is analysed for several
parameters, including frequency characteristics, voicing, and
acoustic volume.
The second phase uses data from the first to give
a broader view of the cry and reduces the number of parameters to
those that are most useful.
The frames are put back together and characterised
either as an utterance — a single ‘wah’ — or silence, the
pause between utterances. Longer utterances are separated
from shorter ones and the time between utterances is recorded.
Pitch, including the contour of pitch over time, and
other variables can then be averaged across each utterance.
In the end, the system evaluates for 80
different parameters, each of which could hold clues about a baby’s health.
The paper describing the tool is published in the
Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
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