A group of university researchers in the Northwest (including nursing mothers) have proposed a way to alleviate one of the most anxious dilemmas of early breastfeeding: How much milk does a baby consume?
The new device is the result of a collaboration between pediatricians and engineers – a small set of wireless electrodes worn on the mother’s breasts to measure the amount of milk expressed during feeding.
Although it is still in development and has not been used to the public yet, Julia Seitchik’s first child weighs less than 5 pounds and she was able to test it with her third child and call it “change game changes.”
She is committed to breastfeeding her first baby, but “no room for mistakes.” If her baby loses more than 10% of her weight, the neonatal must be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit.
A small portion of the wireless electrodes measure the amount of milk expressed during feeding and transfer the data to a phone with Bluetooth.
(Northwestern University)
“You don’t know what they’re going to get. You don’t know if milk will come out, because especially at the beginning, it’s not like flow,” Seitchik said. She hired a lactation consultant, and before and after feeding, she weighs the baby to make sure she gets enough milk – a tedious process that requires her to have a small proportion at home.
“There’s a lot of anxiety around her,” she said. “My husband is like, ‘We should feed her!'”
This is usually the moment of breastfeeding, Dr. Jennifer Wicks said. When she used to work in a pediatric clinic, parents would “come in and just panic, their kids weren’t enough, they didn’t produce enough milk. It was really just a totally unknown milk.”
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Wicks said anxiety itself can reduce milk flow, and many mothers will start pumping water and introducing formulas at this point, which can further reduce milk production. Ultimately, many people just give up breastfeeding.
Only 27% of infants in the United States are breastfeeding until they are 6 months old. Healthy People 2030, a Department of Health and Human Services initiative that sets national health goals, sets a 42% goal, acknowledging that breastfeeding can be challenging and not all women can do it for many reasons.
“If we can bring mom closer to this goal, it will make us feel like we’ve at least partially succeeded in this task,” Wicks said.
The creation of the small device began four years ago when a team of engineers from Northwest McCormick Institute of Engineering visited NICU to address issues that affect patient care.
Animation of breast milk monitoring device. (Northwestern University)
Pediatricians want to solve the dilemma: Mom wants to know how much milk the baby drinks, but there is no way to know. In NICU, the sickest babies cannot even breastfeed safely unless they can measure the exact amount of milk consumed.
“They asked if we could cook solutions to our needs,” said John Rogers, who led the engineering team.
They have to go to work.
The team first tried to create a device that could be worn by babies. They tried to install sensors on the baby’s chin and chest to test whether the amount of baby drink can be measured by swallowing, but this didn’t work. They tried to measure the properties of the baby’s stomach, but it was difficult to isolate the effect of milk. So they switch to measuring mothers.
“We walked a lot of end points and almost gave up,” Rogers said. Finally, Rogers conducted an accidental visit to his physician, where he used a small device to check the BMI, which sent electrical signals through the body to measure fat mass. He wondered, can the same technology be used to measure milk in the breast?
Therefore, a breastfeeding device was born: a small piece of wireless electrode was placed on the breast, measuring the changes in breast tissue current to determine how much milk was expressed. Data is transmitted to the phone via Bluetooth, and parents can watch consumption data during feeding.
The researchers tested the device for 12 pumping and breastfeeding mothers and published the results in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. Feeding is rarely predictable, Rogers said. Sometimes it starts slowly and then builds. At other times, the baby will drink milk at the beginning and then continue with the feeding.
“Being able to watch it on the phone provides a lot of peace of mind and guidance,” Rogers said, who provided information to mothers on how long it takes to feed and whether the baby needs to be relocated.
It also tells parents and doctors whether the mother may need to change her breastfeeding.
“Some mothers have a birth that feeds the entire community, while others don’t,” said Dr. Craig Garfield, a physician at Lurie Children Hospital and a professor at Feinberg Medical School. “If you know your mom isn’t producing enough, you can feed her feed first and then pump water to increase her supply.”
Seitchik was part of the trial and used the device at home while pumping milk for his son, which he praised.
“It’s a little fun to just blindly get into these situations in this data-driven world,” she grieved. “It feels like we should know how much our kids are eating.”
For decades, new technologies have developed slowly during the development of new mothers and babies after childbirth.
“This is not a huge opportunity for market share, so there isn’t a lot of venture capital funding, but it’s also a very compelling need,” Rogers said. “It’s a good space for scholars to get in and try to fill that gap.”
Private markets have been reluctant to invest in postpartum equipment, “because these things are used for a short time, and sometimes they can be expensive,” said Christina Fal, an investor at Scrub Capital and author of the second opinion of Health Technology News. Often, women buy devices like wearable breast pumps and sell them online or give them to friends.
“Then you lose a client,” Farr said.
But investors began to notice opportunities for women’s health after some breakthrough success, including Maven, a $1.7 billion women’s health startup and MIDI, which focuses on menopause.
Farr said the postpartum period is also mature. “There is a lot of despair and demand right now, and there has been little change in supporting women over the past few decades.”
This article is part of the Times Early Childhood Education Program, focusing on learning and development of California children from birth to 5 years of age. For more information about the program and its charitable funders, please go to latimes.com/earlyed.
