If they told you to emulate the movements babies make when breastfeeding, what gesture would you make? Surely you would take the nose out and start raising them up and down, similar to how we see babies sucking pacifiers. However, chest suction is very different from this gesture, and it is made up of various instinctive movements among which one stands out above the others: tongue making a wave.
From the outermost part of the tongue to the innermost part, the tongue makes a kind of wave that, together with the negative pressure that is created inside the mouth (the baby makes a suction cup), the palate that stops from the top, lips and cheeks, makes get to extract very effectively the food you need.
This complex movement has never been able to be replicated artificially (and I would almost say not naturally, because adults are not able to do so), until it occurred to a mother that perhaps the best breast pump would be the one who could imitate that type of suction. Well, according to what is seen in the video, you may have achieved it.
Anabella breast pump
His name is Masha Waldberg and she is a nursing mother who decided to get some milk after breastfeeding so that her husband could also feed her daughter Ania. Thus he realized that, despite noticing that he had milk, despite feeling that with an effective extraction he would be able to save enough, with the breast pump he could not get enough.
He thought it was a waste of time to spend a few minutes pumping milk if the breast pump was not able to pump effectively enough and looked for other models that could get more milk in the same period of time.
As explained in Indiegogo, in his campaign to raise funds to create the Anabella, no breast pumps stood out especially above the others, because everyone did similar things without being able to emulate the actual sucking of a baby.
Mission: create an artificial baby mouth
Thus, he decided to create what she had so much sought and had not found: a breast pump that did something as close as possible to the mouths of babies and children who suck, something like an artificial baby mouth, under the hypothesis that thus the extractions would be more effective and, therefore, faster.
If you look at these videos you will see (more or less), what are the movements we described at the beginning:
And apparently they have succeeded (it is quite surprising to see the movements they have achieved with the device):
Collection of funds to move forward
Now comes, for her and her team, the most complicated. They have to refine the prototype, do real tests with mothers and even durability tests to make sure the breast pump works a long time. They have to request FDA approval (Food & Drug Administration) to be able to market it and, obviously, they have to be able to manufacture them in large numbers so that it reaches all women who may be interested.
If it will end up being a reality or not, we don't know. If it will be as effective as it seems to the naked eye, compared to other extractors, we don't know it either. So we will keep track of if there are developments in this regard, and for now we are left with that impressive advance at the mechanical level that, without a doubt, It looks a lot like what babies do when breastfeeding.
