Is baby getting enough breastmilk? New device helps moms learn

A group of university researchers at Northwestern — including a nursing mother — have come up with a way to ease one of the most anxiety-producing dilemmas of early breastfeeding: How much milk is the baby consuming?

The new device — the result of a collaboration between pediatricians and engineers — is a small wireless set of electrodes worn on the mother’s breast that measures the amount of milk expressed during a feeding.

Although it still in development and is not yet available to the public, Julia Seitchik, who left the hospital with her first child weighing less than 5 pounds, was able to give it a test run with her third child and called it a “game-changer.”

She was committed to breastfeeding her first infant, but there was “no room for error.” If her baby lost more than 10% of her body weight, the newborn would have to be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit.

“You have no idea what they’re getting. You have no idea of whether milk’s coming out, because especially in the beginning it’s not like it’s flowing,” Seitchik said. She hired a lactation consultant, who would weigh the baby before and after a feeding to make sure she was getting enough milk — a cumbersome process that required she have a tiny scale at home.

“There was a lot of anxiety around it,” she said. “My husband was like, ‘We should just formula feed her!’”

This is often the moment that breastfeeding gets derailed, said Dr. Jennifer Wicks, an attending physician in the NICU at Lurie Children’s Hospital and instructor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who was breastfeeding her own child during the study she was involved with. When she used to work in a pediatric practice, Wicks said, parents would “come in and just be panicked that their baby isn’t getting enough, and that they weren’t producing enough milk. It’s really just a complete unknown oftentimes.”

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The anxiety itself can decrease the flow of milk, and many mothers would start pumping and introducing formula at this point, which can further reduce milk production, said Wicks. Ultimately, many simply give up on breastfeeding.

Just 27% of infants in the U.S. breastfeed exclusively through 6 months of age. Healthy People 2030, a Health and Human Services Department initiative that sets national health targets, set a goal of 42%, an acknowledgment that breastfeeding can be challenging and not all women are able to do it for a host of reasons.

“If we can get moms even a little closer to that goal it will make us feel like we’ve at least partially been successful in this mission,” said Wicks.

The creation of the tiny device began four years ago with a tour of the NICU by a team of engineers from Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering dedicated to solving questions affecting patient care.

Animation of breastmilk monitoring device. (Northwestern University)

The pediatricians wanted help with a dilemma: Moms wanted to know how much milk their babies were drinking, but there was no way to know. And in the NICU, the sickest babies wouldn’t even be able to breastfeed safely unless they could measure the exact amount of milk they were consuming.

“They asked us if we could cook up a solution that would address that need,” said John Rogers, who leads the engineering team.

They got to work.

The team started by trying to create a device that could be worn by the baby. They tried mounting sensors on the infant’s chin and chest to test if the amount of milk a baby drinks could be measured through swallowing, but it didn’t work. They tried to measure properties of the stomach of the baby, but it was too hard to isolate the effect of the milk. So they switched to measuring the mother.

“We went down so many dead ends that we almost gave up,” said Rogers. Finally, Rogers made a fortuitous visit to his own physician, where he had his BMI checked using a small device that sends electrical signals through the body to measure the amount of fat. Could the same technology be used to measure milk in the breast, he wondered?

And so the breastfeeding device was born: a small wireless set of electrodes placed on the breast that measure the change in electrical currents of the breast tissue to determine how much milk is being expressed. The data are transmitted via Bluetooth to a phone, where parents can watch the consumption data appear over the course of a feeding.

Researchers tested the device on 12 pumping and breastfeeding mothers and published the results in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. Rogers said feeding is rarely predictable. Sometimes, it starts slow and then builds. Other times, the baby gets a flood of milk in the beginning, and then slows down as a feeding goes on.

“Being able to watch it on the phone provides a lot of reassurance and guidance,” said Rogers, giving the mother information on how long she needs to feed, and whether she might need to reposition the baby.

It also informed parents and physicians on whether the mother might need to change her breastfeeding routine.

“There are some moms who produce enough to feed the whole neighborhood but others do not,” said Dr. Craig Garfield, an attending physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital and professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine. “If you knew a mom wasn’t producing enough, you could have her feed first and then pump after to increase her supply.”

Seitchik, who was part of the trial and used the device at home while pumping milk for her son, praised it.

“In this data driven world, to just to kind of go blindly into these situations feels like a little funny,” she sad. “It feels like we should know how much our kids are eating.”

For decades, new technology was slow to develop for new mothers and babies in the postpartum period.

“It’s not a large market share opportunity, so there’s not a lot of venture capital funding, but also it’s a really compelling need,” said Rogers. “It’s a great space for academics to come in and try to fill that gap.”

The private market has been hesitant to invest in postpartum devices “because it’s a very short period of time that these things get used, and sometimes they can be quite expensive,” said Christina Farr, an investor with Scrub Capital and author of the health tech newsletter Second Opinion. Often, a woman will buy a device like a wearable breast pump and then sell it online or give it to a friend.

“Then you just lost a customer,” said Farr.

But investors are beginning to take note of the opportunities in women’s health after a few breakout successes, including Maven, a women’s health startup valued at $1.7 billion, and Midi, which is focused on menopause.

The postpartum period is also ripe for development, said Farr. “There’s so much desperation and need at this moment, and very little that has really changed in the past number of decades to support women.”

This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.