title: Monitoring of infant feeding behavior using a jaw motion sensor.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL USA.
authors.forename: Muhammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Farooq
authors.affiliation: Department of Nutrition Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham AL USA.
authors.forename: Paula C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Chandler-Laney
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Development & Family Studies, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL USA.
authors.forename: Maria
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hernandez-Reif
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL USA.
authors.forename: Edward
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Sazonov
mesh_terms: D001903:Bottle Feeding; D001942:Breast Feeding; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods; D007223:Infant; D007568:Jaw / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013391:Sucking Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D013686:Telemetry / Q000379:methods*; D014741:Video Recording / Q000379:methods
keywords: bottle-fed; breast-fed; feeding behavior; infants; jaw motion; obesity; sucking count; sucking frequency; wearable sensors