Developers of FDA-Cleared Smart Bottle for Premature Infants Building Discharge Decision Tool

Featured on MedCity News by Stephanie Baum.

One out of every 10 births was premature in 2015, according to data form the Centers for Disease Control. One complication of premature infants is that they can have trouble gaining weight as they learn to suckle. Atlanta-based medtech company Nfant Labs developed a connected baby bottle for use in nenonatal intensive care that was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2015.

In a phone interview with CEO Lou Malice, he talked about the evolution of the business and plans to create a clinical decision support tool to help clinicians better determine when infants are ready to be sent home.

The standard for determining whether a baby is ready to feed typically involves putting a finger in their mouth to see if they suck on it. nFant saw an opportunity to better quantify that development with a smart bottle, Nfant Feeding Solution. The nipple contains a probe that measures tongue movement to collect swallowing data. The feeding process is a cycle of sucking, swallowing, followed by a breath.

The probe contains a low energy Bluetooth connection to a tablet. A clinician can view the tablet and see the movement of the tongue and how that changes over time. 

“What we have done is develop a product to give objective information on what is going on in the baby’s mouth,” said Malice. “We can capture that data and send to cloud database and do analyics on it.”

To date, 13 hospitals have purchased the smart bottle, including Emory Midtown Hospital in Atlanta and Boston Children’s Hospital. The product has generated interest at hospitals with a neonatal intensive care facility. The device has especially resonated with children’s hospitals because they understand the need, Malice said.

In the next few weeks, Nfant Labs plans to roll out a reporting and analytics companion system for the device aimed at clinicians. The way Malice sees it, what makes Nfant different is it’s creating proprietary data around feeding as opposed to data mining.

“We are a diagnostic device business, but we want to become known as a treatment device to give guidance to physicians,” Malice said. “We have been able to take data from a 72-baby study from the University of Kentucky and we’re able to predict the length of stay pretty accurately.

Nfant Labs investors come in the form of angel investors and family offices and it has raised $3.5 million to date. Malice noted that it is prepping for a $5 million Series B round to expand its sales force and research and development and to take its device to more hospitals.

To learn more about Nfant Labs click here.