Design, development and experimental validation of a non-invasive device for recording respiratory events during bottle feeding

Abstract

In newborns, a poor coordination between sucking, swallowing and breathing may undermine the effectiveness of oral feeding and signal immaturity of Central Nervous System. The aim of this work is to develop and validate a non-invasive device for recording respiratory events of newborns during bottle feeding. The proposed device working principle is based on the convective heat exchanged between two hot bodies and the infants' breathing. The sensing elements are inserted into a duct and the gas exchanged by infants is conveyed into this duct thanks to an ad hoc designed system to be mounted on a commercial feeding bottle. Two sets of experiments have been carried out in order to investigate the discrimination threshold of the device and characterize the sensor response at oscillating flows. The effect of distance and tilt between nostrils and device, and the breathing frequency, have been investigated simulating nostrils and neonatal respiratory pattern. The device has a discrimination threshold lower than 0.5 L/min at both 10° and 20° of tilt. Distance for these two settings does not affect the threshold in the investigated range (10-20 mm). Moreover, the device is able to detect breathing events, and to discriminate the onset of expiratory phase, during a neonatal respiratory task delivered by a lung simulator. The results foster the successful application of this device to the assessment of the temporal breathing pattern of newborns during bottle feeding with a non-invasive approach.

Supporting Oral Feeding Skills Through Bottle Selection

“…A recent comprehensive review of available instrumental assessments for infant sucking development is also focused on evaluation, not treatment . Researchers are also designing sophisticated equipment to measure nutritive sucking abilities in the infant (Cavaiola et al, 2014;Tamilia, Delafield, Fiore, & Taffoni, 2014). Using the available evidence, this review has focused attention on the need for this research.…”

A Device for Respiratory Monitoring during Nutritive Sucking: Response to Neonatal Breathing Patterns

“…In particular, the proposed sensor detects the gas flow during the breathing phases, thanks to the dependence of the base-emitter voltage ( be ) on the base-emitter temperature ( be ) [23,24] which depends in turn on the velocity of the hitting gas. In steadystate conditions, the transistors, placed in a constant fluid stream at temperature , reach a superficial equilibrium temperature be depending on the heat flow ( ) exchanged with the fluid [17]. Thus, be can be expressed as a function of the fluid mean velocity (V):…”

“…Angles bigger than 30 ∘ were not investigated as the considered feeding bottle already has its own 30 ∘ tilt. Therefore, these ranges allow covering all the angles and distances, which can occur during bottle feeding [17].…”

“…More recently, smart textiles based on optical fiber sensors have been proposed to enable respiratory monitoring during Magnetic Resonance Imaging procedures [16]. Our team recently proposed a novel sensor for neonatal breathing monitoring during bottle feeding [17]. Our main goal is to assess the coordination of breathing and sucking during feeding.…”