Mercedes was part of the Horizon CDT 2010 cohort, and is now a Transitional Assistant Professor at the 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.
![](https://cdt.horizon.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Mercedes-Torres-CDT-BabyFace-700x460-1-250x164.jpg)
Mercedes will use this grant to:
- Collect infant-pain data at the National Hospital Nigeria and Changsha hospital (China). This variable dataset will ensure that the findings are generalizable.
- Invite neonatal nurses to rate the collected videos for pain intensity based on standard infant pain scales.
- Produce an image analysis system for automatic 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 clinical to obtain feedback on the ‘tool’ and its applicability within clinical settings.