Exploring Infant Cry

Exploring Infant Cry: Medical and Technological Analysis and Signal Processing Perspectives brings together the most advanced medical and technical knowledge in the study of infant crying. This book includes medical, technical, and computational approaches to cry processing for classification and diagnostic purposes. The book is written by medical and technical experts in Infant Cry processing and is an important step forward for research dealing with the process and interpretation of crying from both medical and technical perspectives. The number of research groups dedicated to this area has been growing, and with more research emerging it will be possible to use crying analysis as a powerful non-intrusive diagnostic tool for a large number of pathologies from the time they begin to appear, as well as for determining the cause of the crying in such a way as to tell parents the various reasons why a baby is crying. Exploring Infant Cry: Medical and Technological Analysis and Signal Processing Perspectives presents the advances of international groups of researchers where normal and pathological patterns of infant crying are studied, the possibilities of cry analysis for neonatal diagnosis, as well as perspectives on the development of this emerging field of research. The links of a baby’s first cries with the formation of language are addressed in the volume, as well as the communicative potential of the crying signal that makes this attribute a primary part of the vast and complex environment of human communication. Although the analysis of infant crying has received the attention of scientists and scholars of crying from diverse and varied approaches for more than 50 years, it continues to be an open topic with multiple unsolved or sufficiently investigated aspects, mainly in the area of routine applications to neonatal diagnosis.

Exploring Infant Cry: Medical and Technological Analysis and Signal Processing Perspectives brings together for the first time the most advanced medical and technical knowledge on the study of crying babies. Considering on one hand the most important information as a diagnostic element, from the medical point of view, along with that provided by the technological field in order to automate acoustic processing, extraction of the most distinctive features, as well as recognition of outstanding patterns and their classification by type of pathology or cause of crying. These provide informative support tools for biomedical researchers, doctors, and clinicians. As a contribution to the technological support, a notable aspect of the book is the authors’ compilation of the most recent approaches to the classification of infant crying in correspondence with the important advances achieved in the field of signal processing, Artificial Intelligence, and soft computing. Readers of the book will find it to be an effective way to discover the foundations of the analysis of infant crying, as well as the various approaches and perspectives that have made it possible to advance the understanding of crying as an acoustic, neurophysiological, communicative, and linguistic phenomenon.

• Presents the research advances in studying normal developmental as well as pathological patterns of infant cry.
• Introduces readers to the medical and physiological foundations of infant cry, including neurophysiology and a spectrographic study of infant cry in cases with congenital hypothyroidism.
• Discusses the relationship of infant cry characteristics to the child’s mother language.
• Investigates the acoustic characteristics for analysis of infant cry, including signal processing.
• Presents AI and soft computing techniques for recognition and classification of infant cry for diagnostics, clinical support, and research.