SUCKING DEVICE FOR FEEDING OF NEWBORN INFANTS

KDL医疗技术公司正在开发仪器， 用于围产期婴儿营养性吸吮的诊断目的， 产后时期，这为研究和 监测新生儿的喂养行为。还有不断增长的环保压力 为了应对费用上涨， 需要客观的方法来评估新生儿临床 这将有助于早日作出解雇决定。营养 吸吮具有提供这种评估的巨大潜力。 工作是针对开发一种适用于评估 早产儿和足月新生儿，这将是具有成本效益和合适的 用于常规托儿所。它将包括一个一次性喂养单元， 基于微处理器的数据收集和分析单元。将 在一些临床托儿所进行评估，以获得所需的 优化配置和设计规范的经验 仪器，其接受的托儿所人员，并为发展 使用的特定协议。然后将在广泛的 婴儿获得一系列吸吮措施的数据库， 孕龄，包括正常和高危情况。的 数据将与其他临床和发育测量相关联， 开发软件，提供客观的测量和临床 为用户提供指导。 拟议的商业应用：正在开发的抽吸装置将 适用于所有新生儿托儿所，为检测提供市场 临床状态。在每年出生的300多万婴儿中， 美国有超过6万个生育中心。这将有助于诊断和 治疗早产儿和低出生体重儿的喂养问题， 以及为足月婴儿做出早期出院决定。

KDL Medical Technologies is developing instrumentation to allow analysis for diagnostic purposes of infant nutritive sucking in the perinatal and post-natal period, which provides quantitative measures for studying and monitoring the feeding behavior of newborn infants. The growing pressure for early discharge of infants in response to rising costs has also created the need for objective methods of assessing neonatal clinical status that would be useful for early discharge decisions. Nutritive sucking has great potential for providing such an assessment.The present work is directed to developing a clinical device suitable for assessing preterm and full term neonates, that will be cost-effective and suitable for routine nursery use. It will comprise a disposable feeding unit and a microprocessor based data collection and analysis unit. It will be evaluated in a number of clinical nurseries to obtain the needed experience for optimizing configuration and design specifications of the instrument, its acceptance by nursery personnel, and for developing specific protocols for use. It will then be tested on a wide range of infants to obtain a data base of sucking measures for a range of gestational ages, including normal as well as at-risk conditions. The data will be correlated with other clinical and developmental measures, to develop software that will provide objective measures and clinical guidance for the user. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: The sucking device being developed would be applicable in all newborn nurseries, providing a market for testing the clinical status. of the more than 3 million infants born annually in over 60,000 birth centers in the US. It will be useful in diagnosis and treatment of feeding problems in preterm and low birth weight infants, and for making early discharge decisions for full term infants.