Mercedes was part of the Horizon CDT 2010 cohort, and is now a Transitional Assistant Professor at Horizon Digital Economy Research, University of Nottingham. Her research interests involve the medical treatment of newborns in Intensive Care Units (ICU), to further investigate the finding that neonates have a higher sensitively to pain than older children and that prolonged exposure to pain and the use of analgesics may have adverse effects on the neurological development of infants.
Mercedes will use this grant to:
- Collect infant-pain audiovisual data at the National Hospital Nigeria (between October to December 2017, over 200 videos were collated)
- Recruit 2 neonatal nurses to annotate the videos for pain intensity based on standard infant pain scales.
- Produce an image analysis system for automatic and continuous pain assessment.
- Organise a workshop for Healthcare in Computer Vision focusing on challenging research data collection due to the sensitive nature of the conditions or difficulty recruiting participants.
- Organise a proof of concept workshop with neonatal clinicians to obtain feedback on the ‘tool’ (developed by Joy Egede as part of her PhD research) and its applicability within clinical settings.
More information on Mercedes research can be found here
