Wireless Oral Feeding Monitor for Premature Infants with Flex Sensor for Respiration

Premature infants have poor feeding skills which leads to oral feeding disorders. This is because prematurity disrupts the normal growth and neurodevelopment, especially a neural circuit called suck central pattern generator. This involves three motor patterns such as sucking, respiration and swallowing that have to co-ordinate with each other for a normal feeding to occur. Moreover preterm infants have immature lungs which lead to the improper coordination of respiration pattern with the other two. Monitoring of all those three motor patterns in preterm infants is quite challenging and no monitoring system for this purpose exists so far. The proposed system monitors the motor patterns of sucking, swallowing and respiration. Sucking is measured using a pressure sensor, swallowing with the help of microphone and respiration with EMG electrodes. To evaluate those patterns a detection algorithm based on fractal dimension is also proposed that has less computational complexity. The result obtained has proved the efficiency of the proposed system.