Home-based, early intervention with mechatronic toys for preterm infants at risk of neurodevelopmental disorders (CARETOY):a RCT protocol

Background: Preterm infants are at risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, including motor, cognitive or behavioural problems, which may potentially be modified by early intervention. The EU CareToy Project Consortium ( http://www.caretoy.eu ) has developed a new modular system for intensive, individualized, home-based and family-centred early intervention, managed remotely by rehabilitation staff. A randomised controlled trial (RCT) has been designed to evaluate the efficacy of CareToy training in a first sample of low-risk preterm infants. Methods/Design: The trial, randomised, multi-center, evaluator-blinded, parallel group controlled, is designed according to CONSORT Statement. Eligible subjects are infants born preterm without major complications, aged 3-9 months of corrected age with specific gross-motor abilities defined by Ages & Stages Questionnaire scores. Recruited infants, whose parents will sign a written informed consent for participation, will be randomized in CareToy training and control groups at baseline (T0). CareToy group will perform four weeks of personalized activities with the CareToy system, customized by the rehabilitation staff. The control group will continue standard care. Infant Motor Profile Scale is the primary outcome measure and a total sample size of 40 infants has been established. Bayley-Cognitive subscale, Alberta Infants Motor Scale and Teller Acuity Cards are secondary outcome measures. All measurements will be performed at T0 and at the end of training/control period (T1). For ethical reasons, after this first phase infants enrolled in the control group will perform the CareToy training, while the training group will continue standard care. At the end of open phase (T2) all infants will be assessed as at T1. Further assessment will be performed at 18 months corrected age (T3) to evaluate the long-term effects on neurodevelopmental outcome. Caregivers and rehabilitation staff will not be blinded whereas all the clinical assessments will be performed, videotaped and scored by blind assessors. The trial is ongoing and it is expected to be completed by April 2015. Discussion: This paper describes RCT methodology to evaluate CareToy as a new tool for early intervention in preterm infants, first contribution to test this new type of system. It presents background, hypotheses, outcome measures and trial methodology. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01990183 . EU grant ICT-2011.5.1-287932

Under the Cover Infant Pose Estimation using Multimodal Data

Infant pose monitoring during sleep has multiple applications in both healthcare and home settings. In a healthcare setting, pose detection can be used for region of interest detection and movement detection for noncontact based monitoring systems. In a home setting, pose detection can be used to detect sleep positions which has shown to have a strong influence on multiple health factors. However, pose monitoring during sleep is challenging due to heavy occlusions from blanket coverings and low lighting. To address this, we present a novel dataset, Simultaneously-collected multimodal Mannequin Lying pose (SMaL) dataset, for under the cover infant pose estimation. We collect depth and pressure imagery of an infant mannequin in different poses under various cover conditions. We successfully infer full body pose under the cover by training state-of-art pose estimation methods and leveraging existing multimodal adult pose datasets for transfer learning. We demonstrate a hierarchical pretraining strategy for transformer-based models to significantly improve performance on our dataset. Our best performing model was able to detect joints under the cover within 25mm 86% of the time with an overall mean error of 16.9mm. Data, code and models publicly available at https://github.com/DanielKyr/SMa

A Modular Sensorized Mat for Monitoring Infant Posture

We present a novel sensorized mat for monitoring infant's posture through the measure of pressure maps. The pressure-sensitive mat is based on an optoelectronic technology developed in the last few years at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna: a soft silicone skin cover, which constitutes the mat, participates in the transduction principle and provides the mat with compliance. The device has a modular structure (with a minimum of one and a maximum of six sub-modules, and a total surface area of about 1 m(2)) that enables dimensional adaptation of the pressure-sensitive area to different specific applications. The system consists of on-board electronics for data collection, pre-elaboration, and transmission to a remote computing unit for analysis and posture classification. In this work we present a complete description of the sensing apparatus along with its experimental characterization and validation with five healthy infants