Every year at the start of August World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated globally. The campaign highlights the importance of breastfeeding for the health and well-being of both infants and mothers.
The Role of Kangaroo Mother Care in Supporting Breastfeeding:
Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is a simple yet powerful practice involving skin-to-skin contact between a newborn and a parent. There has been extensive research into the benefits of kangaroo care and skin to skin contact into helping to establish breastfeeding.
Preterm babies are often in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU) for extended periods. It has been shown that increased skin to skin contact through KMC reduces morbidity and hospital stay and improves rates of breastfeeding and that benefits are retained over the long term (Charpak et al, 2017). Increased breastfeeding also reduces morbidity for both baby and mother. (Conde-Agudelo et al, 2016).
SurePulse:
SurePulse recognises the importance of Kangaroo Mother Care for increasing breast feeding rates, including for those born preterm or low birthweight; Our vision is a world where baby-centred innovation transforms neonatal outcomes.
Wireless monitoring of the baby is believed likely to increase rates of KMC by making it easy for staff to facilitate KMC, and to improve the quality and duration of KMC delivered in terms of comfort, to reduce the need to disturb the baby to adjust sensors, and which subsequently will improve bonding of parent and baby (Bonner et al, 2017). This enhanced bonding of parent and baby will help breast milk production.
The SurePulse VS is SurePulse’s first device approved in the US, UK and EU for clinical use, and comprises a thermo-protective single-use cap that provides clinical teams with wireless, continuous and accurate heart rate information. SurePulse is also developing wireless, multi-parameter monitoring solutions, designed to increase KMC and therefore support breastfeeding.
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