Sensor System for Open/Closed Eye Detection in Infants During Feeding

Rapid weight gain during infancy expands the threat of obesity. Currently, there is a lack of tools to monitor the feeding behavior of infants. This paper presents a sensor system and a method for inspecting satiety cues exhibited by infants during feeding in the form of opening/closing of the eyes. Open eyes and vigorous sucking indicate an alert, actively feeding infant, while eye closing in combination with a slower frequency or lower strength of sucking indicate that an infant is getting full and falling asleep. The monitoring is performed by a sensor system consisting of a feeding bottle instrumented with a camera to monitor facial expression and a pressure sensor to monitor sucking. A method for open eye detection is proposed based on the histograms of oriented gradients features and multi-stage cascade classifier. In a pilot study of 4 infants, a recall value of 82.40% and F1-score of 80.79% was achieved while testing on 914 infant images.