Construction of Quantitative Assessment Index for Infant-Holding Postures During Bottle-Feeding

An effective bottle-feeding method for infants with cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) is the Kumagai method. However, the number of specialists in the method is limited and providing direct instruction to many people is challenging. To solve this problem, developing a guidance system that enables learners to acquire Kumagai method skills without a direct instructor is desirable. Constructing such a guidance system requires defining a quantitative assessment index for skills in the Kumagai method. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new quantitative assessment index for infant-holding posture, which is the most basic and crucial skill in this method. Our experiments confirmed that the proposed index could stably assess the reproducibility of the infant-holding posture in the Kumagai method while reducing the effect of postural fluctuations during the feeding motion.