Breastfeeding can be an important experience between a mother and a newborn.
It helps babies bond with their mama and can protect them from infections and diseases. But for many families, breastfeeding is an arduous process. One concern from parents is that it’s hard to know how much you’re feeding your child.
Researchers want to address this with a new device that helps measure the amount of breast milk an infant is drinking in real-time. They recently published their study on this in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Dr. Jennifer Wicks, instructor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, joins us to talk about the innovation.
4 questions with Dr. Jennifer Wicks
How does this device work?
“Essentially, this is a device that is composed of soft, flexible sensors that adhere to the skin around the area where the mom is gonna be breastfeeding the baby. And these sensors essentially send tiny, safe electrical currents through the breast tissue through these two small electrodes that are contained in the sensor. And in doing so, they’re able to detect any subtle changes in the breasts, electrical properties. And interestingly enough, as moms are feeding the baby, and as milk is going from the mom’s breast into the baby, those electrical properties inside the breast are changing.
“And even those tiny, subtle changes of the composition of the breast are able to be picked up by these sensors and then transmitted wirelessly to the smartphone or whatever handheld device the mom is carrying so that she can see a graphical representation of how much milk the baby is getting during that process.”
How are you sure the device works?
“In our testing process, the first stage of testing, we actually used mothers who were pumping. And in doing so, we were able to be able to measure how much milk mom was getting into the bottle she was pumping into. And we were able to correlate that with the data we were getting through the sensors. So we essentially could make sure that the data the sensors were giving us through the smartphone app was accurate compared to the amount of milk that was actually going into the bottles during that pumping session.”
Could this device make anxious moms even more anxious?
“I work at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago in the neonatal intensive care unit. And there are a lot of babies that are in the NICU who are limited in the amount of milk that they’re able to drink partially due to the fact that premature babies, for example, have very underdeveloped digestive systems and it makes them very vulnerable to drinking too much milk could cause obvious issues such as potential reflux or intestinal disorders that they can possibly have. We oftentimes either require the baby to be fed via a bottle or via tube feeding just because of the fact that we don’t have an accurate way of knowing in real time how much milk the baby is getting to safely be able to say that the baby will not take more than five milliliters or 10 milliliters, or whatever the limit is that we have on that baby.
“This is just another way that moms in the community who either do benefit or feel that more information would be helpful for them, especially to decrease some of the stress around breastfeeding that already exists. And additionally for babies that are outta the hospital, but that are very either very low birth weight or who are having a delay in their growth trajectory, it can help provide families and pediatricians, lactation consultants with that extra information to be able to confidently keep babies at home with their mothers instead of having to bring them into the hospital or to be able to allow them to continue breastfeeding without necessarily having to supplement with bottles when they may not otherwise have to.”
This device still has to go through Food and Drug Administration approval, but how and when do you see it eventually being available on the shelf to mothers?
“ That would be our main goal, something that could be used both inside the hospital as well as consumers at home with their own infants as you mentioned. The process in order to go through the FDA will take likely a couple of years. So we are hoping that there will not be any large hurdles to cross on the path there. And our goal would be to hopefully have it in people’s hands in the next couple of years.”
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Ashley Locke produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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