A group of Northwestern university researchers, including nursing mothers, came up with ways to alleviate one of the most anxiously generating dilemmas of early breastfeeding. How much milk does a baby consume?
The new device – the result of a collaboration between pediatricians and engineers – is a small wireless set of electrodes worn on the mother’s breasts, measuring the amount of milk that is expressed during feeding.
Although still in development and still unavailable to the public, Julia Seichik, who left the hospital with a child under 5 pounds with her first child, was able to give her a test run with her third child, which she called a “game changer.”
She was committed to breastfeeding her first toddler, but “there was no room for error.” If her baby loses more than 10% of her weight, the newborn must be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit.
A small set of electrodes measures the amount of milk that is expressed during feeding and sends data to the phone using Bluetooth.
(Northwestern University)
“You don’t know what they’re getting, especially since it doesn’t seem to flow at first, so you don’t know if milk will come out or not,” Sicchik said. She hired a nursing consultant. A lactation consultant weighs the baby before and after feeding to get enough milk.
“There was a lot of anxiety around it,” she said. “My husband was like, ‘We just need to feed her!” ”
This is often a moment when breastfeeding derails, said Dr. Jennifer Wicks, the NICU physician at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Northwestern, who breastfeeded during the research she was involved in, and an instructor at Feinberg School of Medicine in Northwestern. When she was working in pediatric practice, Wicks said her parents were “just panicing that the baby wasn’t getting enough and that they were not producing enough milk. That’s really completely unknown.”
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Anxiety itself can reduce milk flow, and many mothers can begin pumping and introducing it at this point, further reducing milk production, Wicks said. In the end, many people just give up on breastfeeding.
Only 27% of US breastfeeding infants are only 6 months old. Healthy People 2030 is an initiative in the Health and Human Services sector that sets national health goals, with a goal of 42%, breastfeeding can be challenging, and not all women can do it for many reasons.
“If we can get Mama a little closer to that goal, it makes me feel like I’ve at least partially succeeded in this mission,” Wicks said.
The creation of the small device began four years ago with a tour of NICU by a team of engineers from the McCormick School of Engineering in Northwestern, dedicated to solving questions that affect patient care.
Animation of breast milk monitoring devices. (Northwestern University)
The pediatrician was seeking help from the dilemma. Mom wanted to know how much milk the baby was drinking, but there was no way to know. And in the NICU, the sickest babies can’t even safely breastfeed unless they can measure the exact amount of milk they are consuming.
“We’ve got a lot of effort into making this a reality,” said John Rogers, head of the engineering team.
They got to work.
The team started by trying to create a device that babies could wear. They attached sensors to the infant’s chin and chest to test whether the baby drink could be measured by swallowing, but it didn’t work. They tried to measure the characteristics of the baby’s stomach, but it was too difficult to separate the effects of milk. So they switched to measuring their mothers.
“We almost gave up because we had so many dead ends,” Rogers said. Finally, Rogers made a chance visit to his own doctor. There, we checked our BMI using a small device that sends electrical signals to our body to measure the amount of fat. Did he wonder if the same technique could be used to measure milk in the breast?
That’s why breastfeeding devices were born. A small set of wireless electrodes located in the breast measures changes in breast tissue currents to determine how much milk is expressed. The data is sent to the phone via Bluetooth, where parents can see consumption data displayed during the feeding process.
The researchers tested the devices on 12 pumping and breastfeeding mothers and published the results in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. Rogers said feeding was not predictable. Sometimes it starts slowly and then build. Also, babies will receive a flood of milk first, which will slow them down if they continue to eat.
“Being able to see it on the phone provides a lot of security and guidance,” Rogers said, giving the mother information about how long she needs to feed and whether she needs to rearrange the baby.
They also informed parents and doctors whether mothers should change their breastfeeding routine.
“Some people are enough to feed the whole neighborhood, but others aren’t,” said Dr. Craig Garfield, attending physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital and professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine. “If you know that moms aren’t producing enough, you can feed them first and then pump them later to increase the supply.”
Seitchik praised the device at home while pumping milk for his son.
“In this data-driven world, it feels a little funny just to go blindly to these situations,” she saddens. “I feel like I should know how much my kids are eating.”
For decades, new technologies have been slowed to develop for new postnatal mothers and babies.
“It’s not a large market share opportunity, so there’s not much venture capital funding, but it’s also a really compelling need,” Rogers said. “It’s the perfect space for scholars to come in and try to fill that gap.”
“We’ve seen a lot of effort into the next generation of health technology,” said Christina Farr, an investor at Scrub Capital and author of Health Tech Newsletter’s Second Opinion. Often, women buy devices like wearable breast milk pumps and sell them online or give them to friends.
“Then you just lost a customer,” Far said.
However, investors are beginning to look at women’s health opportunities after several breakout successes, including Maven, a women’s health startup worth $1.7 billion, and MIDI, which focuses on menopause.
Farr said that the time for development is ripe for postpartum. “At this point, there’s so much despair and need, and very few things have really changed in the last few decades to support women.”
This article is part of the Times Early Childhood Education Initiative and focuses on learning and development for California children from birth to age 5. To learn more about the initiative and its charity funders, visit latimes.com/earlyed.
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