NurtureNet: A Multi-task Video-based Approach for Newborn Anthropometry

Yash Khandelwal, Mayur Arvind, Sriram Kumar, Ashish Gupta, Sachin Kumar Danisetty, Piyush Bagad, Anish Madan, Mayank Lunayach, Aditya Annavajjala, Abhishek Maiti, Sansiddh Jain, Aman Dalmia, Namrata Deka, Jerome White, Jigar Doshi, Angjoo Kanazawa, Rahul Panicker, Alpan Raval, Srinivas Rana, Makarand Tapaswi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 332-342

Malnutrition among newborns is a top public health concern in developing countries. Identification and subsequent growth monitoring are key to successful interventions. However this is challenging in rural communities where health systems tend to be inaccessible and under-equipped with poor adherence to protocol. Our goal is to equip health workers and public health systems with a solution for contactless newborn anthropometry in the community. We propose NurtureNet a multi-task model that fuses visual information (a video taken with a low-cost smartphone) with tabular inputs to regress multiple anthropometry estimates including weight length head circumference and chest circumference. We show that visual proxy tasks of segmentation and keypoint prediction further improve performance. We establish the efficacy of the model through several experiments and achieve a relative error of 3.9% and mean absolute error of 114.3 g for weight estimation. Model compression to 15 MB also allows offline deployment to low-cost smartphones.