Discriminating the Infant Cry Sounds Due to Pain vs. Discomfort Towards Assisted Clinical Diagnosis

Cry is a means of communication for an infant. Infant cry signal is usually perceived as a high-pitched sound. Intuitively, significant changes seem to occur in the production source characteristics of cry sounds. Since the instantaneous fundamental frequency (F0) of infant cry is much higher than for adults and changes rapidly, the signal processing methods that work well for adults may fail in analyzing these signals. Hence, in this paper, we derive the excitation source features F0 and strength of excitation (SoE) using a recently proposed modified zerofrequency filtering method. Changes in the production characteristics of acoustic signals of infant cries due to pain and discomfort are examined using the features F0, SoE and signal energy. These changes are validated by visually comparing their spectrograms with the spectrograms of the acoustic signals. Effectiveness of these discriminating features is examined for different pain/discomfort cry sounds pairs in an ‘Infant Cry Signals Database (IIIT-S ICSD)’, especially collected for this study. Fluctuations in the features F0, SoE and energy are observed to be larger in the case of infant cry due to pain, than for discomfort. These features can help in developing further the clinical assistive technologies for discriminating different infant cry types and initiating the remedial measures automatically.