Vision-Based Embedded System for Noncontact Monitoring of Preterm Infant Behavior in Low-Resource Care Settings

Preterm birth remains a leading cause of neonatal mortality, disproportionately affecting low-resource settings with limited access to advanced neonatal intensive care units (NICUs).Continuous monitoring of infant behavior, such as sleep/awake states and crying episodes, is critical but relies on manual observation or invasive sensors, which are prone to error, impractical, and can cause skin damage. This paper presents a novel, noninvasive, and automated vision-based framework to address this gap. We introduce an embedded monitoring system that utilizes a quantized MobileNet model deployed on a Raspberry Pi for real-time behavioral state detection. When trained and evaluated on public neonatal image datasets, our system achieves state-of-the-art accuracy (91.8% for sleep detection and 97.7% for crying/normal classification) while maintaining computational efficiency suitable for edge deployment. Through comparative benchmarking, we provide a critical analysis of the trade-offs between model size, inference latency, and diagnostic accuracy. Our findings demonstrate that while larger architectures (e.g., ResNet152, VGG19) offer marginal gains in accuracy, their computational cost is prohibitive for real-time edge use. The proposed framework integrates three key innovations: model quantization for memory-efficient inference (68% reduction in size), Raspberry Pi-optimized vision pipelines, and secure IoT communication for clinical alerts. This work conclusively shows that lightweight, optimized models such as the MobileNet offer the most viable foundation for scalable, low-cost, and clinically actionable NICU monitoring systems, paving the way for improved preterm care in resource-constrained environments.