Abul Hosain Sabuj, Gazipur:
A baby is called a newborn up to 28 days after birth. Death within this period is called neonatal death. Birth asphyxia is one of the leading causes of infant mortality in Bangladesh. According to a report published by UNICEF, birth asphyxia is one of the causes of 23% of child deaths in the country.
Mr. Samrat Kumar Dey, a faculty member of the Computer Science and Engineering program, atthe School of Science and Technology, Bangladesh Open University, is currently working on a research project titled “Notun Kuri” to develop a mobile application based on machine learning, with the aim of reducing infant mortality in the country and diagnosing birth asphyxia. Under this project, birth asphyxia will be diagnosed by recording and analyzing the cries of newborn babies from selected hospitals across the country. Mr. Samrat Dey, principal investigatorof “Notun Kuri” said, “To meet the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), better health care services need to be ensured through the use of frontier technologies in the health sector. This is the first time the initiative has been taken to diagnose birth asphyxia by analyzing the cries of newborn babies and develop the country’s first newborn cry dataset”.
Recently, the “Notun Kuri” project has been nominated under the ICT Innovation Fund in the fiscal year 2022-2023 from the Department of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) under the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. In implementing this project, the Information and Communication Technology Department of the government believes that the project will be able to create new services through inventive breakthroughs in providing smart healthcare for the socio-economic development of the country.