Preemies birth monitoring using color detection method

Abstract

Administration of vaccines and nutritional supplements to baby or infant is mainly depends on their chronological age and weight. For examples, iron supplements and hepatitis B vaccine should be initiated when the baby is 2 weeks or two months old and their weight is around 2 kg, respectively. To ensure effective vaccines and supplements administration, physicians need to continuously monitor baby/infant age and weight. For prematurely born baby or preemie, the administration of vaccines and supplements is far more challenging due to two main reasons. First, physicians need to make necessary adjustment based on preemie estimated birth date i.e. week 37. Second, a preemie usually needs frequent office care - to screen vision or hearing problems and assess baby development - involving multiple medical disciplines which require accurate coordination. We proposed a monitoring system to classify the behavior of a preemie using intelligent vision system. The focus is on predicting preemie behavior based on preemie motion, face and skin analysis. Our preliminary experimental results show a promising performance of the initial part of the system involving preemie face and skin detection algorithm.