A group of university researchers from Northwestern – including a nurse mother – has found one of the most anxious dilemmas of breastfeeding: how much milk consumes the baby?
The new device – The result of a collaboration between pediatricians and engineers – is a small set of wireless electrodes carried on the mother’s breast which measures the amount of milk expressed during a diet.
Although he is still in development and is not yet available to the public, Julia Seithik, who left the hospital with her first child weighing less than 5 pounds, was able to give him a test with his third child and called him a “game changer”.
She was determined to breastfeed her first child, but there was “no room for error”. If his baby lost more than 10% of his body weight, the newborn should be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit.
A small set of wireless electrodes measures the amount of milk expressed during a power supply and transmits the data to a phone with Bluetooth.
(Northwestern University)
“You have no idea what they get. You have no idea whether milk comes out, because especially at the beginning, it is not as if it flowed,” said Seithik. She hired a lactation consultant, who would weigh the baby before and after a diet to ensure that she was receiving enough milk – a heavy process that required that she had a small scale at home.
“There was a lot of anxiety around him,” she said. “My husband was like:” We should just feed her! ” »»
This is often the moment when breastfeeding is derailed, said Dr. Jennifer Wicks, a doctor of the Lurie children’s hospital and the Feinberg School of Medicine instructor in Northwestern, who breastfeeds her own child during the study with her. When she worked in a pediatric practice, Wicks said that the parents “just came panicked that their baby did not have enough and that they did not produce enough milk. It is really a complete unknown often. ”
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Anxiety itself can decrease the flow of milk, and many mothers would begin to pump and introduce formulas at this stage, which can further reduce milk production, Wicks said. In the end, many simply give up breastfeeding.
Only 27% of infants in the United States breastfeed exclusively until the age of 6 months. Healthy people 2030An initiative of the Department of Health and Social Services which sets national health objectives has set an objective of 42%, recognition that breastfeeding can be difficult and not all women can do for a multitude of reasons.
“If we can even bring the mothers closer to this objective, it will give us the impression that we have at least partially successful this mission,” said Wicks.
The creation of the small device began four years ago with a worn tour by a team of engineers from the McCormick School of Engineering in Northwestern dedicated to the resolution of questions affecting patient care.
Animation of the breast milk monitoring system. (Northwestern University)
The pediatricians wanted help with a dilemma: the mothers wanted to know how much milk their babies were drinking, but there was no way to know. And at the factory, the most sick babies could not even breastfeed safely unless they can measure the exact amount of milk they consumed.
“They asked us if we could prepare a solution that would meet this need,” said John Rogers, who heads the engineering team.
They got to work.
The team started by trying to create a device that could be worn by the baby. They tried assembly sensors on the chin and infant’s chest to test if the amount of milk that a baby drinks could be measured by swallowing, but that did not work. They tried to measure the properties of the baby’s stomach, but it was too difficult to isolate the effect of milk. They therefore went to the measure of the mother.
“We have come down so many sites that we have almost abandoned,” said Rogers. Finally, Rogers made a fortuitous visit to his own doctor, where he had his BMI checked using a small device that sends electrical signals through the body to measure the amount of fat. Could the same technology be used to measure milk in the breast, he wondered?
And therefore the breastfeeding device was born: a small set of wireless electrodes placed on the breast which measures the change of electric currents of the breast tissue to determine the amount of milk expressed. The data is transmitted via Bluetooth to a phone, where parents can watch the consumption data appear during a diet.
Researchers Tested the device Out of 12 pumping and breastfeeding mothers and published the results of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. Rogers said that food is rarely predictable. Sometimes it starts slowly and then is built. Other times, the baby gets a flood of milk at first, then slows down while a diet lights up.
“Being able to watch it on the phone offers a lot of insurance and advice,” said Rogers, giving information about the mother over the duration of the transformation and if she may need to reposition the baby.
He also informed parents and doctors to know if the mother may need to change her breastfeeding routine.
“There are mothers who produce enough to feed the whole neighborhood, but others not,” said Dr. Craig Garfield, a doctor at the children’s hospital in Lurie and professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine. “If you knew that a mom did not produce enough, you could first have her flow and then pump to increase her supply.”
Seithik, who was part of the test and used the device at home while pumping milk for her son, congratulated him.
“In this world focused on data, just to blindly go into these situations seems a little funny,” she said sad. “It looks like we should know how much our children eat.”
For decades, new technologies have been slow to develop for new mothers and babies during the postpartum period.
“It is not a great opportunity for market share, so there is not much funding for venture capital, but it is also a really convincing need,” said Rogers. “It is a big space for academics to come and try to fill this gap.”
The private market has hesitated to invest in postpartum devices “because it is a very short period of time that these things are used, and sometimes they can be quite expensive,” said Christina Farr, an investor with Scrub Capital and author of The Health Tech Newsletter Second opinion. Often, a woman will buy a device like a portable breast pump, then sell it online or give it to a friend.
“Then you just lost a customer,” said Farr.
But investors are starting to take note of women’s health opportunities after a few successes in small groups, especially Mavena women’s health startup worth $ 1.7 billion, and Noonwhich focuses on menopause.
The postpartum period is also ripe for development, said Farr. “There is so much despair and need right now, and very little that has really changed in recent decades to support women.”
This article is part of the Times early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to the age of 5. For more information on the initiative and its philanthropic donors, go to latimes.com/earlyyed.