Smart device can measure how much milk breastfed babies really drink
Not knowing how much milk a baby consumes when breastfeeding can cause anxiety for parents, but an innovative device seems to provide objective measurements
By Carissa Wong
14 May 2025
It can be difficult to gauge how much milk a breastfed baby is getting
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Parents could one day track how much breast milk their baby is drinking, thanks to a device that sends alerts to their smartphones in real time.
“A common anxiety around breastfeeding is the uncertainty surrounding the amounts of breast milk that babies get,” says Daniel Robinson at Northwestern University in Illinois. “It increases stress for the breastfeeding mothers, parents and even the clinicians.” Undernourished infants may grow less quickly and, in extreme cases, can become dehydrated.
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Clinicians often assess how well infants breastfeed by weighing them before and after a feed, and reviewing how frequently they fill diapers, but these are cumbersome and crude measures, says Robinson.
To develop a more precise metric, he and his colleagues built a device made up of four electrodes, each a few centimetres wide, that can stick to the breast, away from the nipple. Two electrodes transmit very weak electrical currents from one side of the breast to the other, where they are received by the second pair.
The device sends these recordings to a smartphone app that calculates how much milk has been released in real time, based on the electrical signals becoming weaker as more milk is released, says Robinson.
