Motivating Spontaneous Infant Kicking Motions through Long Term Learning Utilizing a Robotic Mobile System

Our research investigates methods and systems to allow for early detection of motor impairment in infants and innovative interventions with the goal of improving longterm outcomes. A robotic baby mobile is utilized to motivate spontaneous kicking motions, which is used as a marker for predicting the potential of motor development delays. Our previous work investigated how the different stimuli modalities of a baby mobile can encourage infant kicking. We utilized a 3D camera system to detect the kicking motions, as well as recorded specific metrics of each kicking episode. In this work, we investigate the possibility of an infant having a preference of baby mobile stimuli that results in increased and sustained kicking motions. This preference is learned over multiple sessions with one infant and utilizes a Markov Decision Process to develop a policy.