Analysis of Cry in New Born Infants

The acoustic analysis of infant cry is used to deduce information on the state of health of new-born babies as well as of children a few weeks old. Crying is the first tool of communication for an infant. These cries seem to be uniform, but there are a lot of differences between two infant‟s cries. Infant cry characteristics reflect the development and possibly the integrity of the central nervous system. The preterm infants and infants with neurological conditions have different cry characteristics like fundamental frequency, when compared to healthy full term infant. There are differences between full term and preterm infant in their neuro-physiological maturity and its impact on their speech development. Cry characteristics of New born infant, changes with increase in age. Acoustics analysis of infant cry signals can thus give an aid to clinical diagnosis and prevention of distress since it is easy to perform, cheap and completely non-invasive. Hence, this paper aims at pre-processing to eliminate silenced region of cry signal and estimating the fundamental frequency (pitch) using time domain and frequency domain analysis. Such parameters are of interest in exploring brain function at early stages of child development, for the timely diagnosis of neonatal disease and malformation.