Monitoring of Infant Feeding Behavior Using a Jaw Motion Sensor

Rapid weight gain during infancy increases the risk of obesity. Given that infant feeding may contribute to rapid weight gain, it would be useful to develop objective tools which can monitor infant feeding behavior. This paper presents an objective method for examining infant sucking count during meals. A piezoelectric jaw motion sensor and a video camera were used to monitor jaw motions of 10 infants during a meal. Videotapes and sensor signals were annotated by two independent human raters, counting the number of sucks in each 10 second epoch. Annotated data were used as a gold standard for the development of the computer algorithms. The sensor signal was de-noised and normalized prior to computing the per-epoch sucking counts. A leave-one-out cross-validation scheme resulted in a mean error rate of -9.7% and an average intra-class correlation coefficient value of 0.86 between the human raters and the algorithm.