Modified Pacifier, AI can Determine Newborns’ Nursing Mechanics
A modified pacifier combined with AI algorithms to analyze the data it produces could determine if newborns are learning the proper mechanics of nursing. The data can help determine if a surgical intervention is necessary. Watch this video to learn more.
“We wanted to keep the technology as simple as possible with off-the-shelf, cost-effective components to facilitate adoption in the clinic,” said James Friend , a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Department of Surgery at UC San Diego.
Transcript
00:00:00 for a feeding assessment okay so we have Mr Henry and his lovely mother who are here to show us how this works what we'll do is plug in the Box over here to the computer open up the application and we get to put Henry's information right here so we have Mr Henry who
00:00:34 is 2 weeks old you can put a medical record number in there or a study ID and then other options on this is the pacifier you'll use we have different types we're going to try the suie with little Henry um if for some reason he doesn't like that one we have nipples that have different shapes so we're going to do the
00:01:03 sooie and this is before any intervention this is before a feeding and then if there was anything that you'd like to note like Henry's not himself today or he just had shots that might change the way he sucks you could um put a little note on the bottom so what we'll do is get out one of these sterilized packets
00:01:41 peaceful peaceful [Music] rest use this connector to the outside the device right here we'll just twist it and then over here under experiment we'll just press to start and it confirms which patient you have which type of pacifier and if there was any intervention and it will get the timer
00:02:23 going let's see if we can get Mr Mr Henry hello hello you are just so cozy did we get you too cozy hello and Henry has not eaten yet so he will likely be very interested in sucking hi hi sweetheart hi do you have any interest in it oh oh
00:03:02 thank you so you can see while Henry sucking it shows us how strong he is how often he's sucking how many sucks we're going to analyze and you want to make sure that you don't start the experiment until the pacifier is able to equalize to just the ambient air you can see you took a little break and you want to get a good segment of his sucking that's
00:03:31 representative of what he does and sometimes if they're not so interested yeah he's he's quite good at this he doesn't even need us to hold it so this is a pretty good segment for us to analyze so we'll stop the experiment these are disposable so we'll take this and what we have have is an immediate readout of uh his amplitude
00:04:05 how often he was sucking and this will go into some software that shows us how this Compares against other little newborns like kenry and it can help us associate any sort of feeding issues they're having and it gives us some numbers to help make clinical decisions on um how to make breastfeeding work [Music]