Australian Journal of Electrical and Electronics

Engineering

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tele20

Diagnostic feasibility of time domain features for

detecting and characterizing cry cause factors - an
investigation

Arun P, Madhukumar S, Vishnu K Kumar, Ron S, Neha M & Princy E

To cite this article: Arun P, Madhukumar S, Vishnu K Kumar, Ron S, Neha M & Princy E (2022)
Diagnostic feasibility of time domain features for detecting and characterizing cry cause factors -
an investigation, Australian Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 19:4, 340-348, DOI:
10.1080/1448837X.2022.2068486

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1448837X.2022.2068486

Published online: 27 Apr 2022.

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AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING
2022, VOL. 19, NO. 4, 340–348
https://doi.org/10.1080/1448837X.2022.2068486

Diagnostic feasibility of time domain features for detecting and characterizing

cry cause factors - an investigation
Arun P, Madhukumar S, Vishnu K Kumar, Ron S, Neha M and Princy E
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, St. Joseph’s College of Engineering and Technology, Palai, India

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The very first cry of an infant gives vital information about the health of infant, and as they Received 2 December 2020
grow the acoustics change with the development of their vocal tract system. This reflects the Accepted 24 February 2022
learning mechanism of infant cry-cause factors, which upon solving will give a huge impact in KEYWORDS
the areas of medical and household. The behaviour of infant cry records is frequently used for Cry-cause factors; infant cry
non-invasive infant health inspection and monitoring. Automated approaches for forecasting analysis; performance
health status, on the other hand, are highly dependent on the features extracted. In this paper, parameters; RMS; statistical
the diagnostic feasibility of the time domain features to detect and discriminate various cry- significance; time domain
cause factors of cry signals is investigated. Mean, peak value, RMS, crest factor, Impulse factor, features
shape factor, energy, and clearance factor are the features employed in this work. It is
discovered that, among the features investigated, RMS is more effective than all other features
in detecting cry-cause factors with a Probability value (P) of 2.23307 × 10−6 and it offers an
accuracy of 91.67%, sensitivity of 90%, and specificity of 93.33%.

1. Introduction sophisticated data acquisition systems. Moreover, use­

New-born child crying has numerous features for spe­
cific experts. For a physiologist, crying is a conduct for
wearing emotional state and also informs approxi­
mately the necessities of the toddler. For a neonate,
crying is the means to communicate his or her physi­
cal discomforts like hunger, pain, and moist diaper.
From a linguistic aspect, a baby’s crying is the begin­
ning of vocalisation and a step towards learning a new
language that will allow the baby to communicate with
the entire world (Nor and Ab-Rashid 2018).
For a medical expert, new-born crying is an indica­
tion of right functioning and coordination of various
organs at time of birth is an alarming signal. For an
engineer, it is acoustic data that comprises records of
the toddler’s needs and physical status in the form of
acoustic signatures such as melody, loudness, timbre,
pitch, intonation, rhythm, and so on. As a result, it is a
multidisciplinary environment where experts from
various backgrounds examine the newborn cry from
various perspectives, implying that these non-verbal
communication data are an important part of the
automated analysis aimed at identifying the cry cause
factors from the features extracted from these cry
signals using signal processing techniques (Ruíz Díaz
et al. 2012). The features may be in time, frequency,
and time frequency domain (Arun, Abraham Lincon,
and Prabhakaran 2018). This non-verbal crying infor­
mation is mainly available in the form of acoustic
information and data samples acquired by various
ful information can be extracted from this recorded
information.
A few approaches that incorporate various fea­
tures to analyse the cry signals are presented in the
literature (Xie 1993; Chittora and Patil 2016;
Jeyaraman et al. 2018; Ramesh et al. 2019; Diaz
et al., 2012; Orlandi et al. 2018; Sahin et al. 2017;
Etz et al. 2013; Hariharan et al. 2012). Xie (1993)
proposed a method to analyse the cry signal using
spectral analysis. They have examined the energy
features derived from the fundamental frequency
components of the pre-processed cry signal. It has
also reported that the strength of the cry signal in
various sub bands of frequency and the invoicing
present in the cry of the child. The changed autocor­
relation method was used to extract fundamental
frequency. They came to the conclusion that funda­
mental frequency features are unimportant in the
analysis of the new-born cry, and that the occurrence
of invoicing in the child’s cry varies with central
nervous system (CNS) age and is a crucial discrimi­
natory function in the study of the new-born cry. In
normal infants (20 days–3 months), the average pro­
portion of invoicing in birth screams is 67.7%, com­
pared to 84.4% in birth screams. When examining the
birth cry, it was discovered that there is far less voi­
cing and, as a result, less vocal fold vibrations.
Chittora and Patil (2016) used the short-time

CONTACT Arun P link2arun.p@gmail.com Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, St. Joseph’s College of Engineering and
Technology, Palai-686 579, India
© Engineers Australia
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING
Fourier transform (STFT) of infant cry signals to
construct energy-based features, which were then
fed into a support vector machine (SVM). They
came to the conclusion that the energy distribution
in the 0–1 kHz region was a potential feature for
categorising infant crying.
Jeyaraman et al. (2018) suggested that the time
domain features were commonly used in the classifi­
cation of neonate cry because of their good detection
efficiency in reduced noise conditions and their low
computing complexity. They also stated that the linear
prediction coefficient (LPC) and mel-frequency cep­
strum coefficient (MFCC) have the specific and quite
well-acoustic properties preferred by researchers in
the study of infant cry classification in order to deter­
mine the essence of multi-informatics neonates crying
signals (Ramesh et al. 2019) proposed a feature extrac­
tion approach from the cry signal that recovered pitch-
related parameters, MFC coefficients, and short-time
energy characteristics. The K-NN algorithm was used
to classify the signal, and it performed well even with
a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Diaz et al. (2012)
recommended a scheme to analyse the qualitative
features in the infant cry recordings as they are capable
to provide vital information to classify normal and
pathological cases as well. For this, they have chosen
the substantial cry segments only with duration
greater than 200 ms from the pre-processed cry
records. They calculated parameters such as the start
and finish of each cry unit, the period, the number of
cry units in the sample, and the fundamental fre­
quency of each segment from these records, as these
factors are useful for the clinician as significant com­
ponents in further assessment.
Orlandi et al. (2018) proposed a technique for cate­
gorising full-term and preterm infant cry records
using parameters including duration, mean, median,
standard deviation, lowest and maximum values of the
primary and resonance frequencies of the pre-
processed cry signals. These features were given into
various classifiers for better classification. Sahin et al.
(2017) developed a scheme for estimating the gesta­
tional age of a new-born based on cry data obtained
during routine blood sample. They calculated the
mean fundamental frequency, jitter percentage, shim­
mer percentage, noise-to-harmonic ratio, intensity,
time interval between painful stimuli and the initial
cry signal, total cry length, and mean utterance dura­
tion time (MUDT) of the pre-processed cry fragments.
A step-by-step multiple linear regression analysis was
also performed to assess the impact of these features.
Etz et al. (2013) introduced a model for detecting
spontaneous and pain-induced cries using character­
istics such primary frequency, intensity, cry length,
formants, vocal fold micro-variability, and harmonics-
to-noise ratio of the pre-processed cry signals.
341
Hariharan et al. (2012) suggested a feature extraction
method based on time-frequency analysis using short-
time Fourier transform (STFT) for the investigation of
infant cry signals. These features were applied to gen­
eral regression neural networks, probability regression
neural network, time-delay neural network (TDNN),
and multilayer perceptron (MLP). It was reported that
the first two neural network are predominant than the
others.
The main swayback of the frequency domain ana­
lysis is that the computation is more complex than the
time domain analysis (Xie 1993; Ramesh et al. 2019;
Diaz et al., 2012; Orlandi et al. 2018; Sahin et al. 2017;
Etz et al. 2013). This analysis shows that there is
a chance to lose the transient information present in
the data as it compares it with the perfect sinusoids.
Moreover, in F-domain analysis the temporal infor­
mation may also be lost due to the transformation
from time to frequency domain. The features used
for cry segment analysis should be able to efficiently
translate the qualitative attributes of the spectrum (Xie
1993; Orlandi et al. 2018) seen through visual exam­
ination to a limited set of numerical indices. The
shortcoming of STFT is that once we set a time win­
dow size, it remains the same across all frequencies
(Kim and In 2012).
In the majority of the above-mentioned studies, the
characteristics were used directly to train the statistical
learning tool rather than first determining statistical
significance and then training the model depending on
the level of significance. Furthermore, the features’
separability and inter-class variability must be vali­
dated prior they can be used in real – world applica­
tions. Because no domain transformation is necessary
in time domain analysis, the interpretation is straight­
forward, and the computational complexity is lower
than that of spectral and spectro-temporal features.
In this work, the diagnostic feasibility to detect and
discriminate different types of cry cause factors using
time domain features of the cry signals is carried out.
The features used are energy, mean, RMS, crest factor
(CRF), impulse factor (IF), peak amplitude (PA),
shape factor (SHF), and clearance factor (CLF). The
selected features used in this manuscript account
directly for the qualitative behaviour of the cry signal
because they are primarily non-stationary in nature
and do not include any domain transformation. They
effectively reflect the qualitative attributes of the signal
via numerical indices. The majority of the selected
features exclusively reflect pattern of variation of sig­
nal amplitude over time. One more attraction is that
these features are analytically simple when compared
to composite frameworks including signal boundary
detection and Linear Predictive Coefficients. Hence,
the response of the proposed method may be better
than other methods.
342 A. P ET AL.
The highlights of this work are as follows: (a)
The proposed time domain features are relatively
simple and computationally less complicated; (b)
The features are accurately examined for statistical
significance utilising Kruskal–Wallis one-way
ANOVA; and (c) The separability among the fea­
tures is assessed through using Box–Whisker plot.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows.
Section 2 describes the cry signal used in this
study as well as the mathematical description of
the time domain features used. Section 3 also
shows the statistical significance of the features
in detecting and discriminating different types of
cry cause factors like hunger, tired, belly pain, and
discomfort and the performance of each features
using as well as the performance of each feature
using the matrices such as accuracy, sensitivity,
and specificity.
Figure 1. Block diagram of procedures involved in the new-born cry examination.
Figure 2. Wave patterns of cry signal of different classes. (a) Tired (b) Discomfort (c) Hunger (d) Belly pain.
2. Methodology
The cry signal used for the analysis carried out in
this work has been provided by the donate cry-
corpus database (Ji, Mudiyanselage, and Gao
2021), in which the cry signal is been recorded
from Android as well as iOS devices. The noise
eliminated signal is given in this data repository.
The different classes of signal available are hunger,
tired, belly pain, and discomfort and are cate­
gorised and kept in different folders. Of this, 30
signals from each of the category is selected. Thus,
a total of 120 samples, 30 from each category is
considered for analysis. All these records are avail­
able as ‘.wav’ files with a duration 6 second and
have a sampling frequency of 8 kHz. The cry sig­
nals of babies aged 4 weeks to 2 years are included
in this repository. It has also understood from the
database that all the records were filtered using
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING 343

a band pass filter with cut-off frequency 250– XPeak

Crest Factor ðCRFÞ ¼ (5)
600 Hz. Hence, a separate filtering mechanism has RMS
not done in the proposed work.
Figure 1 shows the block diagram of the procedures XPeak
incorporated in the infant cry analysis. Prior to the Impulse Factor ðIFÞ ¼ � (6)
μ Xft
feature extraction and evaluation, the cry signal is pre-
processed. It involves offset elimination. The offset
elimination is done to avoid the unwanted dc compo­ RMS
Shape Factor ðSHFÞ ¼ � (7)
nents present in the signal. μ Xft
The wave shape of the signal corresponds to hun­
ger, tired, belly pain, discomfort is shown in Figure 2
P p� �� 2
(a-d). The wave patterns of the signals that correspond ½ Nt¼1 � Xft ��
to hunger, tiredness, belly pain, and discomfort are all Energy ¼ (8)
N
different. In terms of amplitude and randomness, they
are distinct. The signal associated to belly pain, for
example, has a more erratic pattern and has a greater XPeak
Clearance Factor ðCLFÞ ¼ (9)
average magnitude than the other groups. The magni­ Energy
tude of the cry signal caused by hunger is lower than
The statistical significance of the features is assessed
the magnitude of the cry signal caused by the other
using Kruskal–Wallis one-way ANOVA for their abil­
classifications.
ity to identify the reason for the cry. The separability
The mathematical formulation of the pre-
of the features is evaluated qualitatively using the Box-
processing and the features (Prabhakaran, Lincon,
Whisker plot. Matlab® is used for all mathematical
and Arun 2018) utilised are shown in equation 1–9.
computations, signal pre-processing, extraction of fea­
The cry signal after offset elimination is given as,
tures, and statistical evaluation.
1X N
X0 ðtÞ¼ XðtÞ XðtÞ (1)
N t¼1 3. Results and discussions
�
where X(t) is the cry signal, ‘μ Xft ’ is the mean value This section deals with the details of the analysis of the
and the whole number of samples is ‘N’. The signal features on the cry records. That means, it comprises
after offset elimination and filtering ‘ Xft ’ (Arun, the details of the numerical values, range, statistical
Abraham Lincon, and Prabhakaran 2018) is given as. significance, feature separability, evaluation of the per­
formance parameters of each of the features. The
� 1X N
numerical values and the range of features relates to
μ Xft ¼ Xft (2)
N t¼1 the signals of four cry cause factors of are furnished in
Tables 1 and 2, respectively.
The representation of a discrete – time signal with ‘N’ By observing Table 1, it is noted that the values of
quantised level is illustrated below, features except PA and CF are distributed both in posi­
tive and negative regions. For PA and CF, the values are
Peak Amplitude ðPAÞ ¼ MaxðjXft jÞ (3) located in positive side only. For CA and PA, the hunger
exhibits less deviation than all other stages. For the
where YPeak is the Peak amplitude value of stochastic feature RMS, the values of features for Belly pain is
signal. distributed among positive and negative regions. The
majority of the feature values of IF and SF are very
p1 XN �
Root Mean Square value ðRMSÞ ¼ ð Xft 2 close to zero and hence it’s too difficult to interpret
N t¼1 manually. In the case of ‘energy’, the energy of the signal
(4) by hunger predominates others.

Table 1. Numerical values of features of cry signal corresponding to belly pain, hunger, tired and discomfort.
Sl. No Feature Tired Discomfort Hunger Belly Pain
1 Mean −2.09E-17 ± 8.23E-17 6.65E-17 ± 2.46E-16 −1.11E-16 ± 4.48E-16 2.11E-18 ± 7.44E-18
2 PA 0.5085 ± 0.2684 0.5804 ± 0.3083 0.7454 ± 0.1923 0.4462 ± 0.2528
3 RMS 0.0710 ± 0.0621 0.0102 ± 0.0997 0.1278 ± 0.054315 0.0514 ± 0.0496
4 CRF 8.6841 ± 2.5361 9.11 ± 5.7207 6.4794 ± 2.0084 10.5835 ± 5.7398
5 IF −1.59E+18 ± 9.89E+18 −6.37E+16 ± 7.67E+17 −2.65E+17 ± 1.57E+18 −2.65E+17 ± 1.57E+18
6 SHF −7.49E+16 ± 6.07E+17 −2.33E+15 ± 6.62E+16 −4.45E+16 ± 2.43E+17 −1.85E+14 ± 1.99E+17
7 Energy 1370 ± 1803.08 2270 ± 2745.74 2790 ± 1720.132 986 ± 1242.151
8 CLF 6.54E-04 ± 0.0006 5.89E-04 ± 0.0005 0.0003 ± 0.0002 6.87E-04 ± 0.0004
344 A. P ET AL.

Table 2. The range of features of cry signal corresponding to The Class separability, which is based on distance
belly pain, hunger, tired and discomfort. measures, is another metric that can be used to rank
Sl. features and measure the discriminative power of
No Feature Tired Discomfort Hunger Belly Pain
1 Mean −3.11E-16 to −3.17E-16 to −2.33E-15 −3.42E-18
a feature. The idea behind using distance measure­
1.00E-16 9.74E-16 to 6.75E- to 3.97E- ments is that good features should embed items of
17 17 the same class close enough for all classes in the
2 PA 0.0217 to 1 0.0626 to 0.2415 to 1 0.0672 to
1.0001 1.002 dataset (i.e. small interclass variability); good features
3 RMS 0.0018 to 0.006 to 0.0346 to 0.0092 to should also include items of various classes far apart
0.3266 0.426 0.2337 0.2272
4 CRF 3.0619 to 2.43 to 28.70 3.0936 to 4.2625 to (i.e. large interclass variability).
16.6087 11.1262 24.9028 In this work, the Box-Whisker plot is used to mea­
5 IF −2.92E+18 −3.30E+18 −6.90E+18 −3.95E+18
to 5.38E to 1.69E to 2.72E to 5.07E sure the separability offered by the features. This plot
+19 +18 +18 +18 gives a clear picture on how far the extreme values are
6 SHF −5.01E+17 −2.34E+17 −1.10E+18 −4.45E+17
to 3.24E to 1.31E to 3.98E to 5.74E
from most of the data. A box plot is constructed from
+18 +17 +17 +17 five values: the minimum value, the first quartile, the
7 Energy 44.50 to 69.6 to 572 to 6440 189 to 5700 median, the third quartile, and the maximum value.
9900 11,400
8 CLF 1.01E-04 to 8.75E-05 to 0.0001 to 1.70E-04 to We use these values to compare how close other data
3.40E-03 2.50E-03 0.0013 1.70E-03 values are to them.
The Box-Whisker plot of features corresponds to
the cry states like hunger, tired, discomfort, belly pain
By observing the range of features of different
is exposed in Figures 3(a-h).
stages shown in Table 2, it can be inferred that the
From the above Figure 3(a, e and f) all the classes
features PA, RMS, CF and Energy of different cry-
like tired, hunger, belly pain and discomfort are
cause factors are positive and that of the feature
slightly way similar. In the Box-Whisker plot of RMS
‘mean’ it’s negative. But for other three features, they
and Energy (Figure 3(c & g)) all the classes are not
ranging between negative and positive for all cry
inputs. The feature ‘energy’ shows a wider range than lying sufficiently apart spatially from the boxes and
that of all other features. they are somewhat looks same. The plot analogues to
By observing the details given in Tables 1 and 2, it is peak amplitude given in Figure 3(b), the boxes corre­
noted that the numerical indices are somewhat, closely sponding to ‘discomfort’ is mostly overlapped with all
spaced for the feature RMS. These obvious disparities other boxes; that means, the separability offered by
between numerical values and the range of feature this features are very less to discriminate the cry-
values recovered from cry records relating to belly cause factors. By inspecting the Box plot shown in
pain, hunger, tiredness, and discomfort validate the Figure 3(h), the clearance factor of ‘hunger’ offers
possibilities of time domain features for cry signal more feature separability than other three stages. By
analysis. observing the Box-Whisker plot of all the features, it
Kruskal–Wallis tests the statistical significance of has understood that the feature separability offered by
characteristics such as Peak amplitude, RMS, Impulse all the time domain features used in this paper to
factor, Crest factor, energy, clearance factor and Shape discriminate various cry – cause factor is less as most
factor in distinguishing cry-causes due to belly pain, of the boxes corresponds to the features are over­
hunger, tiredness, and discomfort. Kruskal–Wallis lapped together. Moreover, the statistical information
ANOVA is a non-parametric hypothesis test used to regarding the overlap is evident in the numerical
quantify how much feature values retrieved from var­ values of the features as well as the ‘P’ value obtained
ious classes differ from one another. Kruskal–Wallis from the Kruskal–Wallis.
ANOVA (KWA), unlike one-way ANOVA, does not The matrices like accuracy, sensitivity, and specifi­
make the assertion that the data to be tested will be city (Balakrishnan and Sathiyasekar 2015) are used in
normally distributed. The ANOVA values depicted in this work to examine the effectiveness of each features
this work is generated using Matlab®. ANOVA table of to differentiate various cry cause factors.
the test is supplied in Table 3(a-f). The Kruskal–Wallis A diagnostic test’s sensitivity refers to its capacity to
Test yielded Chi-Square values (H) of 8.57, 19.03, 29.01, appropriately detect patients with the medical pro­
19.29, 2.68, 1.97, 24.88, 15 for Mean, Peak value, RMS, blem. This refers to the percentage of persons who
CRF, IF, SHF, Energy, and CLF, as shown in Table 3 are appropriately diagnosed as unwell. It’s the percen­
(a-f). The same features (in the same order as above) tage of true positives that the test correctly recognises,
corresponding to the input signal acquired from hun­ calculated as:
ger, tired, belly pain, discomfort vary with a probability
value of 0.0356, 0.0003, 2.23307x10−6, 0.0002, 0.4442, Sensitivity ¼
True positives
(10)
0.5785, 1.63537x10−5, 0.0018, respectively. True positives þ False negatives
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING 345

Table 3. The ANOVA table of different features.

(a): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Mean’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 10,369.1 3 3456.38 8.57 0.0356
Error 133,607.4 116 1151.79
Total 143,976.5 119
(b): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Peak Value’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 23,020.3 3 7673.43 19.03 0.0003
Error 120,911.7 116 1042.34
Total 143,932 119
(c): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Root Mean Square’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 35,092.1 3 11,697.4 29.01 2.23E-06
Error 108,877.4 116 938.6
Total 143,969.5 119
(d): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Crest Factor’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 23,344.1 3 7781.36 19.29 0.0002
Error 120,633.9 116 1039.95
Total 143,978 119
(e): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Impulse Factor’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 3238.5 3 1079.49 2.68 0.4442
Error 140,739.5 116 1213.27
Total 143,978 119
(f): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Shape Factor’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 2384.5 3 794.82 1.97 0.5785
Error 141,593.5 116 1220.63
Total 143,978 119
(g): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Energy’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 30,103.1 3 10,034.4 24.88 1.64E-05
Error 113,874.9 116 981.7
Total 143,978 119
(h): The KWA table corresponding to the feature ‘Clearance Factor’
Sources Sum of Square (SS) Degrees of freedom (DF) Mean Squares (MS) Chi-Squared value (H) Probablity value (P)
Column 18,146.1 3 6048.69 15 0.0018
Error 125,826.4 116 1084.71
Total 143,972.5 119

Figure 3. The Box-Whisker plot of the features of tired, hunger, belly pain, discomfort. (a) Mean; (b) Peak value; (c) RMS; (d) crest
factor; (e) impulse factor; (f) Shape factor; (g) Energy; and (h) Clearance factor.
346 A. P ET AL.

In general, True positive and False-positive refer to positive and true negative in all analysed cases to
subjects who have been correctly identified and those estimate a test’s accuracy. The mathematical expres­
who have been mistakenly identified. True and False sion is as follows:
negatives are the subjects that were correctly and
incorrectly rejected. ðTP þ TNÞ
Accuracy ¼ (12)
The ability of a test to reliably identify persons ðTP þ TN þ FP þ TNÞ
without the ailment is known as specificity. This refers
to the proportion of healthy people who are appro­ The other two main diagnostic accuracy measure­
priately identified as such. It’s the percentage of true ments are the PPV and NPV. They are linked to
negatives that the test correctly identifies, sensitivity and specificity by a disease prevalence fac­
tor (Π). The PPV is the probability of presence of
True negatives disease assuming a positive test result and is calculated
Specificity ¼ (11)
False positives þ True negatives as follows:
Q
The accuracy of a test refers to its ability to correctly sensitivity x
PPV ¼ Q Q
discriminate between normal and abnormal situa­ sensitivity x þð1 specificityÞ x ð1 Þ
tions. We should determine the fraction of true (13)

Table 4. Matrices of the time domain features to distinguish different cry-cause factors.
Features State Sensitivity (%) Specificity (%) Accuracy(%) Threshold
Mean TH 60 43.33 51.67 −8.00E-19
TB 76.66 63.33 70 −2.72E-19
TD 66.66 63.33 65 −2.72E-19
HB 70 53.33 61.67 −1.29E-19
HD 50 73.33 61.67 1.24E-18
BD 46.66 56.66 51.67 1.37E-18
PA TH 70 73.33 71.67 0.6316
TB 66.66 73.33 70 0.4555
TD 56.66 56.66 56.67 0.5175
HB 93.33 80 86.67 0.4940
HD 70 66.66 68.33 0.6333
BD 66.66 66.66 66.67 0.4442
RMS TH 73.33 76.66 75 0.0884
TB 56.66 80 68.33 0.0547
TD 50 60 55 0.0734
HB 90 93.33 91.67 0.0603
HD 73.33 66.66 70 0.0884
BD 60 86.66 73.33 0.0576
CF TH 76.66 80 78.33 7.2266
TB 46.66 56.66 51.67 8.7879
TD 33.33 70 51.67 9.4639
HB 80 80 80 7.2317
HD 76.66 60 68.33 6.4737
BD 60 63.33 61.67 7.7754
IF TH 66.66 40 53.33 −9.52E+16
TB 56.66 36.66 46.67 −6.06E+16
TD 36.66 56.66 46.67 4.0117E+15
HB 60 70 65 6.87E+16
HD 56.66 53.33 55 2.9336E+14
BD 63.33 63.33 63.33 2.39E+16
SHF TH 66.66 40 53.33 −1.29E+16
TB 56.66 36.66 46.67 −6.68E+15
TD 36.66 56.66 46.67 5.9183E+14
HB 63.33 66.66 65 5.27E+15
HD 56.66 53.33 55 2.9624E+13
BD 60 66.66 63.33 9.81E+15
Energy TH 73.33 80 76.67 1867.95
TB 63.33 66.66 65 807.4493
TD 56.66 70 63.33 1299.7
HB 73.33 93.33 83.33 1624.65
HD 70 66.66 68.33 2103.85
BD 56.66 93.33 75 1306.5
CLF TH 66.66 80 73.33 0.0004
TB 40 73.33 56.67 0.0006
TD 66.66 66.66 66.67 0.0004
HB 86.66 63.33 75 0.0003
HD 60 63.33 61.67 0.0003
BD 73.33 53.33 63.33 0.0003
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING
Similarly, the NPV is defined as the likelihood that the
disease is not present based on a negative test result:
Q employed are mean, peak value, RMS, shape factor,
specificity x ð1 Þ energy, crest factor, clearance factor and impulse
NPV ¼ Q Q
specificity x ð1 Þþð1 sensitivityÞ x
(14)
Table 3 shows the matrices such as sensitivity, specifi­
city, and accuracy of all of the features used to cate­
gorise tired, discomfort, hunger, and belly pain.
In this paper, as already stated, there are eight
features are employed and the performance of each
feature is also evaluated on the six different states like
TH (tired-hunger), TB (tired–belly pain), TD (tired-
discomfort), HB (hunger-belly pain), HD (hunger-
discomfort) and BD (belly pain- discomfort). The
values of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy obtained
for these features are presented in Table 4.
The threshold value is selected in such a way that
the one which is co-located in the nearest point to
(0,1) is set as the threshold in order to maximise the
sensitivity and specificity values (Habibzade,
Habibzadeh, and Yadollahie 2016). From the Table 4,
it is noted that TH states can be easily distinguished by
the feature energy where sensitivity is 73.33%, specifi­
city is 80% and accuracy is 76.67% for a threshold
value 1867.95. TB states can be easily distinguished
by the feature mean where sensitivity is 76.67%, spe­
cificity is 63.33% and accuracy is 70% for a threshold
value −2.72E-19, TD states can be easily distinguished
by the feature clearance factor where sensitivity, spe­
cificity, and accuracy is 66.66% (threshold value
0.0004). The HB states can be easily distinguished by
the feature RMS where sensitivity, specificity, and
accuracy is 90%, 93.33% and 91.67%, respectively, for
a threshold value of 0.0603. The HD states can be
easily distinguished by the feature RMS where sensi­
tivity is 73.33%, specificity is 66.66% and accuracy is
70% for the threshold value of 0.0884. The BD state is
more useful to distinguished by the feature energy
where sensitivity is 56.66%, specificity is 93.33% and
accuracy is 75% for a threshold value of 1306.5. It has
investigated that the RMS feature identifies hunger
and belly pain more efficiently than other features by
noticing the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of
90%, 93.33%, and 91.67%, respectively, for
a threshold value of 0.0603. As a result, a non-
invasive procedure relies on RMS to determine the
cry-cause factor from the cry signals appears to be
more promising than all other features presented in
this paper.
4. Conclusions
The diagnostic feasibility of time domain features to
detect and differentiate different types of cry cause
factors of the cry signals was reviews and discussed
347
in this paper. An example of a case study using
samples was provided for discussed. The features
factor. The Probability value (P) obtained from the
Kruskal–Wallis Test are 2.23307x10−6, 0.0356,
0.5785, 1.63537x10−5, 0.4442, 0.0018, 0.0003, 0.0002
for RMS, mean, shape factor, energy, impulse factor,
clearence factor, peak voltage and crest factor,
respectively. It was inferred that, RMS was found to
be more successful than all other characteristics in
detecting cry-cause factors, with accuracy, sensitiv­
ity, and specificity of 91.67%, 90%, and 93.33%,
respectively. By using the statistically significant fea­
tures an automated non-invasive method can also be
implemented to distinguish various cry-cause fac­
tors. As a future study, the time domain features
used in this work can also be input into various
artificial classifiers to examine the potential of them
to discriminate the cry-cause factors. The ability of
the frequency domain and time–frequency domain
features can also be investigated as a future
enhancement.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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