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Quantitative Real-Time Assessment for Feeding Skill of Preterm Infants

  • Mobile & Wireless Health
  • Published:
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Abstract

Nutritive sucking is the approach of obtaining primary food for newborns within six months. However, completing the precise coordination of sucking-swallowing-respiratory actions under oral feeding is usually difficult for preterm infants and may affect the body and neural development of the premature infant. For this reason, how to obtain the quantitatively physiological information related to oral feeding is useful for physicians making more accurate clinical diagnoses for oral feeding disorders. However, there is still lack of monitoring systems for evaluating the feeding skill of infants quantitatively and objectively. The assessment of the feeding skill or the diagnosis of oral-feeding disorders still depends on the clinical experience of medical staffs. In this study, a novel wireless monitoring system is proposed to evaluate the feeding behavior of infants quantitatively and objectively and analyze the characteristics of these actions under oral feeding. Here, a specific feeding bottle and an optical probe are also designed and successfully applied to non-invasively monitor the sucking and respiratory actions, and a microphone is also applied to monitor the swallowing action. From the experimental results, the sucking and swallowing rate increases and the respiratory rate decreases with the increase of the infant age. Moreover, the duration increases and the interval of sucking-action sequence decreases with the increase of the infant age respectively. The proposed system successfully assesses the feeding behavior of preterm infants and may provide an objective evaluation tool for oral feeding ability and identifying the risk of infant developmental delay in the future.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are greatly indebted to the Southern Taiwan Science Park Bureau, Tainan, Taiwan for the support of the research through contracts in CZ-05-07-11-105, and the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan for the support of the research through contracts in MOST-105-2221-E-009-013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Imaging and Biomedical Photonics, National Chiao Tung University, Tainan City, Taiwan

    Chang-Ting Chen & Bor-Shyh Lin

  2. Department of Pediatrics, Chi Mei Medical Center, Tainan City, Taiwan

    Lin-Yu Wang

  3. Department of Childhood Education and Nursery, Chia Nan University of Pharmacy and Science, Tainan City, Taiwan

    Lin-Yu Wang

  4. Department of Rehabilitation, Chi Mei Medical Center, Tainan City, Taiwan

    Yu-Lin Wang

  5. Center for General Education, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Tainan City, Taiwan

    Yu-Lin Wang

Authors
  1. Chang-Ting Chen
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  2. Lin-Yu Wang
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  4. Bor-Shyh Lin
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Correspondence to Bor-Shyh Lin.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors reported no proprietary or commercial interest in any product mentioned or concept discussed in the article. All authors declare no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

All parents provide a written informed consent for this experiment. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Mobile & Wireless Health

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Chen, CT., Wang, LY., Wang, YL. et al. Quantitative Real-Time Assessment for Feeding Skill of Preterm Infants. J Med Syst 41, 95 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0744-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0744-1

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