  Non-nutritive sucking (NNS) is defined as the sucking action that occurs when
a finger, pacifier, or other object is placed in the baby's mouth, but there is
no nutrient delivered. In addition to providing a sense of safety, NNS even can
be regarded as an indicator of infant's central nervous system development. The
rich data, such as sucking frequency, the number of cycles, and their amplitude
during baby's non-nutritive sucking is important clue for judging the brain
development of infants or preterm infants. Nowadays most researchers are
collecting NNS data by using some contact devices such as pressure transducers.
However, such invasive contact will have a direct impact on the baby's natural
sucking behavior, resulting in significant distortion in the collected data.
Therefore, we propose a novel contact-less NNS data acquisition and
quantification scheme, which leverages the facial landmarks tracking technology
to extract the movement signals of baby's jaw from recorded baby's sucking
video. Since completion of the sucking action requires a large amount of
synchronous coordination and neural integration of the facial muscles and the
cranial nerves, the facial muscle movement signals accompanying baby's sucking
pacifier can indirectly replace the NNS signal. We have evaluated our method on
videos collected from several infants during their NNS behaviors and we have
achieved the quantified NNS patterns closely comparable to results from visual
inspection as well as contact-based sensor readings.
