Altered development of face recognition among infants born amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

To effectively contain the spread of COVID-19, public health agencies mandated special regulations. Although they protected us from COVID-19, these restrictions have inevitably changed the environment around us. It remains unclear how these changes may have affected early cognitive development among infants born during the pandemic. Thus, this study examined how the COVID-19 restrictions have affected infants' face recognition ability, a hallmark of their cognitive capacities. Specifically, we used the familiarization and visual pair comparison paradigm to examine face recognition performance among infants aged 6 to 14 months amid the second wave of the pandemic (February to July 2021). Experiment 1 investigated the recognition of unmasked faces and found that only younger infants, but not older infants, recognized faces by showing a novelty preference. Experiment 2 examined the recognition of faces wearing masks and found that only older infants, but not younger ones, recognized faces by exhibiting a familiarity preference. These results suggest that with limited interactions during the pandemic, infants could have developed an overly specialized face processing ability that failed to recognize the faces of strangers. Moreover, infants could have obtained more information on masked faces during the pandemic and adapted to the current situation. In Expreiment 3, we further confirmed the restriction on infants' interpersonal experiences with a survey conducted both before and during the pandemic. Overall, these findings demonstrated how the pandemic altered early perceptual development and further confirmed that interpersonal experiences during infancy are critical in their cognitive development.

Video plethysmography for contactless blood pressure and heart rate measurement in perioperative care.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and accuracy of remote Video Plethysmography (VPPG) for contactless measurements of blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) in adult surgical patients in a hospital setting. An iPad Pro was used to record a 1.5-minute facial video of the participant's face and VPPG was used to extract vital signs measurements. A standard medical device (Welch Allyn) was used for comparison to measure BP and HR. Trial registration: NCT05165381. Two-hundred-sixteen participants consented and completed the contactless BP and HR monitoring (mean age 54.1 ± 16.8 years, 58% male). The consent rate was 75% and VPPG was 99% successful in capturing BP and HR. VPPG predicted SBP, DBP, and HR with a measurement bias ± SD, -8.18 ± 16.44 mmHg, - 6.65 ± 9.59 mmHg, 0.09 ± 6.47 beats/min respectively. Pearson's correlation for all measurements between VPPG and standard medical device was significant. Correlation for SBP was moderate (0.48), DBP was weak (0.29), and HR was strong (0.85). Most patients were satisfied with the non-contact technology with an average rating of 8.7/10 and would recommend it for clinical use. VPPG was highly accurate in measuring HR, and is currently not accurate in measuring BP in surgical patients. The VPPG BP algorithm showed limitations in capturing individual variations in blood pressure, highlighting the need for further improvements to render it clinically effective across all ranges. Contactless vital signs monitoring was well-received and earned a high satisfaction score.

Video plethysmography for contactless measurement of respiratory rate in surgical patients.

The accurate recording of respiratory rate (RR) without contact is important for patient care. The current methods for RR measurement such as capnography, pneumography, and plethysmography require patient contact, are cumbersome, or not accurate for widespread clinical use. Video Plethysmography (VPPG) is a novel automated technology that measures RR using a facial video without contact. The objective of our study was to determine whether VPPG can feasibly and accurately measure RR without contact in surgical patients at a clinical setting. After research ethics approval, 216 patients undergoing ambulatory surgery consented to the study. Patients had a 1.5 min video of their faces taken via an iPad preoperatively, which was analyzed using VPPG to obtain RR information. The RR prediction by VPPG was compared to 60-s manual counting of breathing by research assistants. We found that VPPG predicted RR with 88.8% accuracy and a bias of 1.40 ± 1.96 breaths per minute. A significant and high correlation (0.87) was observed between VPPG-predicted and manually recorded RR. These results did not change with the ethnicity of patients. The success rate of the VPPG technology was 99.1%. Contactless RR monitoring of surgical patients at a hospital setting using VPPG is accurate and feasible, making this technology an attractive alternative to the current approaches to RR monitoring. Future developments should focus on improving reliability of the technology.

Discrete emotions discovered by contactless measurement of facial blood flows.

ABSTRACTExperiential and behavioural aspects of emotions can be measured readily but developing a contactless measure of emotions' physiological aspects has been a major challenge. We hypothesised that different emotion-evoking films can produce distinctive facial blood flow patterns that can serve as physiological signatures of discrete emotions. To test this hypothesis, we created a new Transdermal Optical Imaging system that uses a conventional video camera to capture facial blood flows in a contactless manner. Using this and deep machine learning, we analysed videos of the faces of people as they viewed film clips that elicited joy, sadness, disgust, fear or a neutral state. We found that each of these elicited a distinct blood flow pattern in the facial epidermis, and that Transdermal Optical Imaging is an effective contactless and inexpensive tool to the reveal physiological correlates of discrete emotions.