It may be difficult to measure how much milk is receiving a breastfeeding baby
Lebedinskaia Natalia/Getty Images
Parents could one day track the amount of breast milk that your baby drinks, thanks to a device that sends alert to their smartphones in real time.
“A common anxiety around breastfeeding is the uncertainty that surrounds the amounts of breast milk obtained by babies,” says Daniel Robinson in Northwestern University in Illinois. “Stress increases for mothers, fathers and even doctors.” Malnourced babies can grow less fast and, in extreme cases, they can dehydrate.
Doctors often evaluate how well babies breastfeed them before and after a food, and check the frequency with which the diaphyers fill, but these are cumbersome and raw measures, says Robinson.
To develop a more precise metric, he and his creamleages build a device formed by four electrodes, each of a few centimeters wide, which can be hit to the chest, far from the nipple. Two electrodes transmit very weak electric currents from one side of the breast to the other, where they are received by the second torque.
The device sends these recordings to an application for smartphones that calculates how much milk has been released in real time, depending on the electrical signals that become waker as more milk is thrown, says Robinson.
To prove the validity of the system, the researchers used it in 12 women who breastfeed while using milk extracts to express in bottles for about 15 minutes. The system estimated the volume of milk collected within approximately 2 milliliters of the real amount, on average, and each participant expresses an average or 50 milliliters.
This suggests that the device could, parents, under the supervision of doctors, to track the nutrition of their babies and make appropriate changes, such as potentially supplementing with formula milk, says Robinson.
The device consists of sticky electrodes that bind to the breast
Northwest University
In another experiment, one of the women was the device while breastfeeding. The application calculated that your baby drinks 24 milliliters of milk, which is similar to the 20 millimeters that the equipment calculated weighing the baby immediately before and after the food, says Robinson.
“One of the most common reasons for mothers with babies of terms that renounce breastfeeding is the perception that they do not have insufficient milk, so this technique could be useful to establish whether that is true or not, and how they position themselves, Mary few trell at the University College London.
But larger studies are needed to verify the accuracy of the approach, as well as if the device interferes with milk production, has some long -term side effect and, if it is from parents only because, says Amy Brown at the University of Swansea in the United Kingdom.
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