Video-based solutions for newborn monitoring

Efficient monitoring of vital signs is a fundamental tool in disease prevention and medical diagnostics. Main physiological parameters to monitor are not only heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and body temperature, but motion analysis may also provide essential information about the clinical status of a patient. Very specific pathological movements can indeed be signs of important or potentially threatening disorders. Besides being almost exclusively performed in hospital settings, conventional monitoring often requires a contact with the body of the patient that makes traditional systems possibly invasive and uncomfortable, especially if applied on newborns. To make home care more accessible and comfortable, novel methods for remote and contactless monitoring have been developed in the recent years. Among others, appealing solutions that have received recent research attention are based on video processing techniques that allow to capture and analyze the movements of a patient in a contactless fashion.