Estudiante/s
Manuel Borrego - Miguel Ángel Mateo - Antonio Piera - José David Castillo Fernández - Lina Ruiz Campuzano
Promoción
2022
Basic info
PARA QUÉ SIRVE
UKY aims to reduce the NICU stay of the pre-term newborn, developing its feeding skills faster by training its nutritive sucking and proper latching and giving a closer feel to a breast than the current hospital pacifier.
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QUÉ TE INSPIRÓ
During a hospital visit, we got to talk to some hospital staff in regards to complaints or opportunities for medical equipment redesigns. The NICU staff showed us what the current pacifier for pre-term and newborn looks like. It got us thinking how such a delicate thing that is a pre-term baby could use such a rough object. The complaints they had about the current pacifier and the effects of overstaying at the NICU led us to look around the problems surrounding pre-term babies, to find that every year 15 million babies are born pre-term. At that moment we set on our path to redesign the pacifier in order to solve the overstay at the NICU
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CÓMO FUNCIONA
As we said UKY aims to develop faster the nutritive sucking, which is an essential reflex newborns use to breastfeed, in order to avoid overstaying at the NICU where they are under stress conditions. We do it by providing a monomaterial object consisting of a shield and a teat, that emulates the behaviour of the breast inside the new born mouth so they get familiarised and practice under similar conditions. The two aspects the design is based on are: What we call the dynamic shape. UKY changes from a bigger default initial shape into a final one that will compress and stretch to adapt to the inside of the mouth. This transition will be done with the wave motion of the tongue and the vacuum found at the nutritive suction. The behaviour of the material. We have made an object with different softness areas: the tip is soft enough for the baby to be able to deform it with the tongue motion while the shield is stiff so it doesn’t get swallowed.
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PROCESO DE DISEÑO
After setting the challenge in our heads we started a long research phase to understand first, what we needed to do in order to help the baby leave the NICU the sooner as possible, and second about the user (pre-term babies). Specifically, we looked into breastfeeding: breast and mouth biomechanics and how they interacted with each other As we thought that user centered design is really important, we carried interviews with NICU nurses as well as neonatal specialists like speech therapists and physiotherapists to find out what were their opinions and complaints on the pacifier. With all of this knowledge we started thinking and working with prototypes of several materials as means to understand the material and shape behaviour we wanted to replicate as well as to look for an adequate softness that the baby could handle. The last thing we needed to do was to find a material that, on the one side, was adequate for the use with a pre-term baby (medical graded, soft, etc) and on the other side that was able to carry out the functionality of our design into a real object.
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QUÉ LO HACE DIFERENTE
All pacifiers have had and currently have the same shape, a slim neck and a teat at the end, if we were to show you different pacifiers and then from memory draw them back you would produce the same shape for all of them. They count with a static shape that resembles the breast shape inside the baby’s mouth while breastfeeding, UKY however takes a steep forward and not only looks at the shape but also the behaviour. Currently pacifiers are used to calm the sucking reflex and they do it well however they could do more, that is the other edge we aim for. Taking up the behaviour aspect we mentioned, UKY makes the most out of the current time and use of a pacifier, not only calming the sucking reflex but also replicating the interaction with which the baby will have to engage to breastfeed.
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PLANES PARA EL FUTURO
The next step is to take this through the proper channels and subject uky to clinical trials to ensure it is complying with all safety regulations. Once approved, it will need to be tested with real users within a controlled environment to evaluate with the results whether using UKY means a significant progress, which translates to reducing more than a day the NICU stay of the newborn pre term baby. As a long-term goal UKY aims to propel the change of the current medical waste legislation. Currently these types of medical devices have to be incinerated, however we decided to use a material that could be sterilised and reused again.
Tutores
Salva Fàbregas
Mario Garcia (Hospital Clínic)
Xavi Riudor
Estudio
Máster en diseño y desarrollo de producto
