Crying is a physiological action made by the infant to communicate and to draw attention. However, especially for a premature infant, this action requires great effort, which may even have an adverse impact on blood oxygenation. In this work we present first results concerning the evaluation of the distress occurring during cry, as related to possible decrease of cerebral oxygenation. A recording system has been developed, that allows synchronised monitoring of the central blood oxygenation and the audio recording of newborn infant’s cry. A multi-purpose voice analysis tool (BioVoice), characterised by high resolution and tracking capabilities, is applied to new-born infant cries. For these signals, the tool provides also detailed statistics (min and max cry length, maximum energy, etc.), to help diagnosis. BioVoice is completely automatic, working with any sampling frequency and F0, and does not need any manual setting of whatever option to be made by the user, thus being easily accessible also to non-experts. Some examples are reported, concerning preterm new-born infants.
Index Terms. newborn cry, blood oxygenation, voice analysis
Cite as: Bocchi, L., Spaccaterra, L., Orlandi, S., Acciai, F., Favilli, F., Atrei, E., Manfredi, C., Donzelli, G.P. (2007) Blood oxygenation vs. cry in preterm newborn infants. Proc. Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA 2007), 215-218
@inproceedings{bocchi07_maveba,
author={L. Bocchi and L. Spaccaterra and S. Orlandi and F. Acciai and F. Favilli and E. Atrei and Claudia Manfredi and G. P. Donzelli},
title={{Blood oxygenation vs. cry in preterm newborn infants}},
year=2007,
booktitle={Proc. Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA 2007)},
pages={215--218}
}