Determining normal infants' level-of-distress from cry sounds

摘要

In this research a set of ten "cry phonemes" is introduced to effectively characterize cry signals from normal infants. The cry phonemes of recorded cries are correlated with subjective parental assessments of the infants' distress levels. From these correlations a single parameter, the H-value, is found as a reliable indicator to the infants' level-of-distress. The H-value can be measured and manipulated efficiently by using computerized signal analysis. This makes it suitable for computer-based automatic infant cry analysis.