What you need to know about the new smart pacifier.
Most women start to think about and prepare for their birth during pregnancy, maybe even putting together an official “birth plan.” And while these can be useful and important to have, the reality is that babies don’t always arrive on schedule or in the way that we might hope or anticipate.
In fact, some studies show that 1 in 10 babies are born prematurely. Babies born before 37 weeks are considered premature. Although sometimes the cause of premature birth can be a mystery. According to Enfamil, “While there are certain risk factors that make premature birth more likely, the cause often can’t be identified. Experts simply don’t know why healthy women without any known health issues sometimes give birth early.”
Babies born prematurely are often treated in the NICU where they receive round-the-clock care from healthcare professionals. This is certainly something to be grateful for, but doesn’t take away the stress and worry for the parents. Depending on how prematurely a baby is born, they may stay in the NICU for weeks or even months.
One great concern with premature babies is that they may miss out on important weeks in the womb which can affect and impact their development. Preemies are at a higher risk of experiencing developmental delays, breathing difficulties, and problems with feeding, vision and hearing. The good news is that, according to the March of Dimes, your baby can probably head home from the hospital when they:
Weigh at least 4 pounds
Can keep warm on their own without the assistance of an incubator
Can breast or bottle feed
Start gaining weight steadily
Can breathe on their own
Thankfully, we can provide our preemies with the best care possible with access to modern technology and medicine. And one of these newest developments is a wireless, bioelectronic pacifier that can monitor babies’ electrolytes and eliminate the need for twice-daily blood draws while in the NICU. According to Jong-Hoon Kim, an associate professor at the Washington State University School of Engineering and Computer Science along with a co-corresponding author on the study, premature babies have a better chance of survival if they get a high quality of care in the first month of birth. He states that “Normally, in a hospital environment, they draw blood from the baby twice a day, so they just get two data points. This device is a non-invasive way to provide real-time monitoring of the electrolyte concentration of babies.”
Proper hydration is also important for all infants, and in preemies, it is detrimental to their development. Methods to monitor their hydration, or sodium and potassium ion levels, include blood-draws in the morning and evening. The smart pacifier can provide not only the same information but constantly and without the invasive blood-draws, based on testing this on a selection of infants in a hospital. The data collected from the smart pacifier can be relayed by Bluetooth to the infant’s caregiver. “You often see NICU pictures where babies are hooked up to a bunch of wires to check their health conditions such as their heart rate, the respiratory rate, body temperature, and blood pressure. We want to get rid of those wires,” said Jong-Hoon Kim.
Pacifiers have other added benefits for babies. According to Scientific American, “A new study has found that use of a pacifier during sleep reduced the chances of a baby suffering from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by 90 percent.” De-Kun Li simplified the reasoning behind why this is, because it can be easy to misunderstand why using a pacifier would have such positive effects on our babies. Li shared that when a baby might want to bury their face in the blankets, the bulky pacifier makes it harder to do that in a way that is unsafe for the baby, therefore preventing the ability to be stifled by blankets.
The benefit of this smart pacifier goes beyond assisting a baby born prematurely and growing in the NICU - it in fact is also allowing the baby to develop habits that are safe outside of the NICU. In an ideal world, we want our babies to be born healthy and full-term, and we want to avoid SIDS in any way physically possible. Knowing that there are tools and new findings out there give our hearts so much more peace.
