Infant-Carrying Posture Determination Using RGB Camera and BlazePose

Currently, 35.2% of mothers suffer from hand and wrist pain after giving birth. Their physical problems are often related to the posture in which they carry their baby. Therefore, correct posture when carrying the baby is important to avoid postpartum physical problems such as tendonitis. However, determining the infant-carrying posture requires feedback from an expert, (e.g., a midwife), and is time-consuming. To overcome this problem, an infant-carrying posture determination (ICPD) method is proposed using an RGB camera and the BlazePose pose estimation model. With the ICPD method, a person carrying an infant can easily determine the quality of their posture when carrying an infant. To achieve a more accurate determination, the ICPD method normalizes the infant-carrying posture and selects features based on the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, which is a widely used performance measure in classification models. The postures of 28 mothers while carrying infants was experimentally determined to validate the proposed system. The experimental results confirmed that ICPD was more accurate on the test dataset than conventional methods, both with and without feature selection.