Perhaps the hardest thing in taking care of a baby is trying to guess what he needs (although you’ll know what his needs are through your own instinct after a time.) Whenever the baby cries, you will be unsure of what he needs. Did he wet himself? Is he hungry? Did he just poop? Does he need a hug or a cuddle? It is really a stressful job.
A team of researchers, directed by Lichuan Liu, have claimed that they were able to develop a baby cry translator.
“Experienced nurses or pediatricians can identify why a baby is crying because they have experience,” says Lichuan Liu, a professor of electrical engineering at Northern Illinois University, who conducted the research at the Digital Signal Processing Laboratory where she is director. “We talked to them, and they mentioned that based on the cry’s sound there are some clues.”
So Liu set out to identify the features of cries that can help mark them as expressions of pain or discomfort. These features include differences in pitch and frequency. The team then developed an algorithm based on automatic speech recognition to detect and identify these features. This “cry language recognition algorithm” was trained on recordings of baby cries taken from a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit. It uses compressed sensing, a process that reconstructs a signal based on incomplete data, which is necessary for identifying sounds taking place in noisy environments. It can identify a baby cry against a background of, say, adult speech or loud television sounds or babbling toddlers—that is to say, the actual environments where babies live. By classifying different cry features, like pitch, the algorithm can suggest whether the cry is due to sickness or pain, and identify the degree of urgency.
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