Abstract
Nutritive Sucking (NS) is a highly organized process that is essential for infants' feeding during the first six months of their life. It requires the complex coordination of sucking, swallowing and breathing. The infant's inability to perform a safe and successful oral feeding can be an early detector of immaturity of the Central Nervous System (CNS). Even though the importance of early sucking measures has been confirmed over the years, the need for standardized instrumental assessment tools still exists. Clinicians would benefit from specifically designed devices to assess oral feeding ability in their routine clinical monitoring and decision-making process. This work is a review of the main instrumental solutions developed to assess an infant's NS behavior, with a detailed survey of the main quantities and indices measured and/or estimated to characterize sucking behavior skills and their development. The adopted sensing measuring systems will be described, and their main advantages and weaknesses will be discussed, taking into account their application to clinical practice, or to at-home monitoring as post-discharge assessment tools. Finally, the study will highlight the most suitable sensing solutions and give some prompts for further research.
Highlights
A recent report of the World Health Organization (WHO) describes how the rate of preterm births all over the world is increasing [1]
We have focused on providing a survey of the principal indices used for the assessment of Nutritive Sucking (NS) behavior, as well as of the quantities measured to extract them
In the previous section we have reported the complex set of indices and quantities, used to objectively assess infant oral feeding
Summary
A recent report of the World Health Organization (WHO) describes how the rate of preterm births all over the world is increasing [1]. This result is interesting since prematurity is the leading cause of newborns’ death and because premature newborns represent a copious and ever-increasing population at high risk for chronic diseases and neurodevelopmental problems. Feeding support is one of the possible strategies reported in [1] to reduce deaths among premature infants Such intervention requires designed tools to assess oral feeding ability, so as to provide clinicians with new devices that may be used for routine clinical monitoring and decision-making. The need for reliable assessment of feeding ability is further highlighted by the American Academy of Pediatrics that included the attainment of independent oral feeding as an essential criterion for hospital discharge [5]
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