Memory-Efficient AI Algorithm for Infant Sleeping Death Syndrome Detection in Smart Buildings

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally transforming smart buildings by increasing energy efficiency and operational productivity, improving life experience, and providing better healthcare services. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is an unexpected and unexplained death of infants under one year old. Previous research reports that sleeping on the back can significantly reduce the risk of SIDS. Existing sensor-based wearable or touchable monitors have serious drawbacks such as inconvenience and false alarm, so they are not attractive in monitoring infant sleeping postures. Several recent studies use a camera, portable electronics, and AI algorithm to monitor the sleep postures of infants. However, there are two major bottlenecks that prevent AI from detecting potential baby sleeping hazards in smart buildings. In order to overcome these bottlenecks, in this work, we create a complete dataset containing 10,240 day and night vision samples, and use post-training weight quantization to solve the huge memory demand problem. Experimental results verify the effectiveness and benefits of our proposed idea. Compared with the state-of-the-art AI algorithms in the literature, the proposed method reduces memory footprint by at least 89%, while achieving a similar high detection accuracy of about 90%. Our proposed AI algorithm only requires 6.4 MB of memory space, while other existing AI algorithms for sleep posture detection require 58.2 MB to 275 MB of memory space. This comparison shows that the memory is reduced by at least 9 times without sacrificing the detection accuracy. Therefore, our proposed memory-efficient AI algorithm has great potential to be deployed and to run on edge devices, such as micro-controllers and Raspberry Pi, which have low memory footprint, limited power budget, and constrained computing resources.