Tamilia E, Delafield J, Fiore S, Taffoni F
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2014;2014:5752-5. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2014.6944934.
Nutritive Sucking (NS) is a highly organized process that can reflect infants' maturation during the early post-natal period. The assessment of NS may provide a sensitive means of evaluating early motor skills and their development. Thus, a reliable tool for assessing sucking behavior may benefit diagnostics and treatment of newborns since the first days of life. The aim of this work is to propose an automatized system to measure sucking ability and calculate a set of objective and quantitative indices for its assessment. We focused on the analysis of the Intraoral Pressure (IP) generated by infants while feeding: an ad-hoc designed software application was developed to analyze the signal obtained by a pressure transducer connected with a catheter placed through a standard bottle teat into the oral cavity during feeding. Automatic algorithms for suck and burst identification and for their characterization are described. We carried out a preliminary test of the system, analyzing data from two healthy term newborns, tested twice over time (1-2 days old and 6-10 weeks later). We calculated a set of different sucking parameters (e.g. sucking amplitude, frequency and area), and proposed some indices, that are typically used for the assessment of motor control, in order to assess the smoothness of IP. Results encourage further investigation of the proposed system for monitoring the development of early sucking skills.
营养性吸吮（NS）是一个高度有组织的过程，能够反映婴儿出生后早期的成熟情况。NS评估可能为评估早期运动技能及其发展提供一种敏感的方法。因此，一种可靠的吸吮行为评估工具可能从新生儿出生第一天起就对其诊断和治疗有益。这项工作的目的是提出一个自动化系统来测量吸吮能力，并计算一组用于评估的客观定量指标。我们专注于分析婴儿进食时产生的口腔内压力（IP）：开发了一个专门设计的软件应用程序，用于分析在喂食期间通过连接到导管的压力传感器获得的信号，该导管通过标准奶瓶奶嘴插入口腔。描述了用于吸吮和爆发识别及其特征化的自动算法。我们对该系统进行了初步测试，分析了两名健康足月儿的数据，在不同时间进行了两次测试（1 - 2日龄和6 - 10周后）。我们计算了一组不同的吸吮参数（如吸吮幅度、频率和面积），并提出了一些通常用于评估运动控制的指标，以评估IP的平滑度。结果鼓励对所提出的系统进行进一步研究，以监测早期吸吮技能的发展。
