FROM getting your baby to latch on, to coping with the pain of bleeding nipples and sidestepping the minefield that is nursing in public, breastfeeding certainly isn’t without its challenges.
But a new start-up is trying to tackle one of the BF hurdles that so many new moms worry about — whether or not your baby is getting enough milk. And it’s a very real problem as research has shown that it can be a contributing factor for women actually giving up breastfeeding.
According to a study in Pediatrics, 60% of women give up breastfeeding earlier than they want to. The most common reason named by the moms in that study was the worry that their babies weren’t getting enough milk.
Many new moms make the switch to bottles purely so they can see how much their babies are consuming at every feed. But a start-up company based in Israel has created a breastfeeding tool that directly tackles this concern.
The new product lets you listen in to sounds of your baby sucking and records how much milk they’ve consumed.
MomSense recently introduced a Smart Breastfeeding Meter which is designed to track and record baby’s breast milk intake during nursing.
It looks like a regular pair of headphones but with a baby-safe sensor that rests just below and in front of the baby’s ear and connects to a free app on your smart phone.
Worried moms can listen to the sounds of their baby swallowing, while an animation on the screen shows the patterns of sucks and swallows. At the end of the session, you’ll know exactly how much your baby consumed.
“We think that it’s a lot more than just a milk consumption meter,” MomSense CEO Osnat Emanuel, who is also a medical doctor, told Fast Company. “It allows a mom to develop a sense of how her baby is feeding. In one or two sessions, she knows to identify how her baby’s swallow sounds.”
Emanuel says that though the concern that a baby is not getting enough milk from breastfeeding is unfounded in many cases, there are instances where the monitor could help highlight situations when the baby really isn’t getting enough maybe because the baby isn’t latching on properly or there are some milk supply issues.
Designed for use with infants from four days old to three months old, the app creates a sort of online feeding diary with baby nursing reports, weight, and photos.
Though it isn’t for sale on the open market at the moment, MomSense has received several rounds of funding and American retailer Target is planning to start selling the device online this month. So it could be a matter of time before it’s sold everywhere./Yahoo! Style