A New Wireless Sensorized Pacifier for Evaluating Infants’ Feeding Skills During the Non-nutritive Sucking

Abstract

One of the most significant procedures for getting the principal food to newborns within six months is nutritive sucking. On the other hand, developing the precise coordination of feeding skills actions under oral feeding is usually critical for premature infants and may affect the body and neural development of them. Thus, data collecting related to the oral feeding is useful for doctors who are seeking to make more accurate clinical diagnoses for related issues to oral feeding skills in preterm infants. There are different factors involved in the process of evaluating the feeding skills of infants, clinical experience of medical staffs is one of the most important ones. However, we still face a deficiency of monitoring systems for evaluating the feeding skills of infants quantitatively and objectively. In this study, an original wireless monitoring system is introduced to facilitate the process of evaluating the feeding behavior of infants both quantitatively and objectively. This unique monitoring system will also assess the process of analyzing the characteristics of oral feeding skills. Here, a specific measurer system was applied to monitor the sucking and expression pressure actions noninvasively. Based on the experimental results, the sucking rate and intensity increased by growing the infants. In contrast, the positive expression pressure decreased under the same condition. The proposed system successfully assessed the feeding behavior of infants. Furthermore, it can perform as an objective tool for evaluating oral feeding ability and identifying the risk of infant developmental delays in the future.