Assessment of feeding teats: an experimental study.

This work aims to present a quantitative metric to assess the impact of feeding teats on the nutritive sucking of newborns. Two different teat models are compared: a classical model (model C), and a model provided with two opposite recesses to match the anatomical characteristics of the mouth of a newborn (model I). This latter feeding teat model has been specifically designed to promote the attachment of the baby, thus improving her/his nutritive sucking performance.Feeding teats are instrumented with a device to assess nutritive sucking (the Feeding Assessment Monitor, FAM). The device records feeding pressures and a software extracts quantitative features already used and validated in clinical applications.Comparative cross-over analysis on 30 healthy newborns, demonstrates the appropriateness of the proposed metric to reveal differences in the teat models. In particular, our data confirm the better attachment of newborns when fed with the I model: they show a longer feeding, with higher level of depressurization, higher regularity, and higher number of sucking events.

An automated system for quantitative analysis of newborns' oral-motor behavior and coordination during bottle feeding.

In this work a novel unobtrusive technology-aided system is presented and tested for the assessment of newborns' oral-motor behavior and coordination during bottle feeding. A low-cost monitoring device was designed and developed in order to record Suction (S) and Expression (E) pressures from a typical feeding bottle. A software system was developed to automatically treat the data and analyze them. A set of measures of motor control and coordination has been implemented for the specific application to the analysis of sucking behavior. Experimental data were collected with the developed system on two groups of newborns (Healthy vs. Low Birth Weight) in a clinical setting. We identified the most sensitive S features to group differences, and analyzed their correlation with S/E coordination measures. Then, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to explore the system suitability to automatically identify peculiar oral behaviors. Results suggest the suitability of the proposed system to perform an objective technology-aided assessment of the newborn's oral-motor behavior and coordination during the first days of life.