Technological solutions and main indices for the assessment of newborns' nutritive sucking: a review.
Nutritive Sucking (NS) is a highly organized process that is essential for infants' feeding during the first six months of their life. It requires the complex coordination of sucking, swallowing and breathing. The infant's inability to perform a safe and successful oral feeding can be an early detector of immaturity of the Central Nervous System (CNS). Even though the importance of early sucking measures has been confirmed over the years, the need for standardized instrumental assessment tools still exists. Clinicians would benefit from specifically designed devices to assess oral feeding ability in their routine clinical monitoring and decision-making process. This work is a review of the main instrumental solutions developed to assess an infant's NS behavior, with a detailed survey of the main quantities and indices measured and/or estimated to characterize sucking behavior skills and their development. The adopted sensing measuring systems will be described, and their main advantages and weaknesses will be discussed, taking into account their application to clinical practice, or to at-home monitoring as post-discharge assessment tools. Finally, the study will highlight the most suitable sensing solutions and give some prompts for further research.
Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Center for Integrated Research, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Álvaro del Portillo, 21, Rome 00128, Italy. e.tamilia@unicampus.it.
Eleonora
E
Tamilia
Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Center for Integrated Research, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Álvaro del Portillo, 21, Rome 00128, Italy. f.taffoni@unicampus.it.
Fabrizio
F
Taffoni
Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Center for Integrated Research, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Álvaro del Portillo, 21, Rome 00128, Italy. d.formica@unicampus.it.
Domenico
D
Formica
Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Center for Integrated Research, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Álvaro del Portillo, 21, Rome 00128, Italy. l.ricci@unicampus.it.
Luca
L
Ricci
Unit of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation, Center for Integrated Research, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Álvaro del Portillo, 21, Rome 00128, Italy. e.schena@unicampus.it.
Emiliano
E
Schena
Laboratory of Developmental Neuroscience and Neural Plasticity, Center for Integrated Research, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Alvaro del Portillo, 28, Rome 00128, Italy. f.keller@unicampus.it.
Flavio
F
Keller
Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Center for Integrated Research, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Álvaro del Portillo, 21, Rome 00128, Italy. e.guglielmelli@unicampus.it.
Eugenio
E
Guglielmelli
D002490:Central Nervous System / Q000502:physiology; D003657:Decision Making; D003679:Deglutition / Q000502:physiology*; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory; D012119:Respiration; D013391:Sucking Behavior / Q000502:physiology*