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Abstract
Misconceptions of infant feeding cues contribute to suboptimal breastfeeding practices in developing countries. Using mixed-methods, we assessed infant feeding patterns in relation to sociodemographic characteristics of a low-income population. A passive wearable device, Automatic Ingestion Monitor (AIM), was worn by mothers for infant feeding assessment in rural and urban communities in Ghana. Maternal self-report of breastfeeding challenges, successes, daily frequency and duration was collected. AIM-captured images were manually annotated and compared to participant self-reported infant feeding patterns. The results show interesting differences between urban versus rural infant feeding practices of Ghanaian mothers. There was high participant compliance (83%) wearing the AIM device, suggesting low user burden during wear time. As expected, maternal-reported infant feeding characteristics differed from AIM captured images. We observed over-reporting of breastfeeding duration and frequency from maternal report. Future studies should explore automatic annotation of images to prevent potential errors associated with manual image annotation.