Data Collection of Infant Cries for Research and Analysis

SummaryAnalysis of infants cries may help in identifying the needs of infants such as hunger, pain, sickness, etc and thereby develop a tool or possible mobile application that can help the parents in monitoring the needs of their infant. Analysis of cries of infants who are suffering from neurologic disorders and severe diseases, which can later on result in motor and mental handicap, may prove helpful in early diagnosis of pathologies and protect infants from such disorders. The development of an infant cry corpus is necessary for the analysis of infant cries and for the development of infant cry tools. Infant cry database is not available commercially for research, which limits the scope of research in this area. Because the cry characteristics changes with many factors such as reason for crying, infant's health and weight, age, etc, care is required while designing a corpus for a particular research application of infant cry analysis and classification. In this paper, the ideal characteristics of the corpus are proposed along with factors influencing infant cry characteristics, and experiences during data collection are shared. This study may help other researchers to build an infant cry corpus for their specific problem of study. Justification of the proposed characteristics is also given along with suitable examples.