Building a Better Breast Pump

Breastfeeding and pumping breast milk can be a fraught experience for many women. Lin Jiang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at San José State, knows this truth from both a personal and a professional angle.

That's why she designed the smart breast pump, a newly patented medical device designed to make the breast pumping experience both less stressful and more effective.

"Most mothers who are seeking help - and I had this experience as well - have a bad pumping experience," Jiang says. Even hospital-grade breast pumps are often painful for many women to use, and this causes stress in mothers, decreasing milk production.

The smart breast pump first occurred to Jiang when she came to the United States from her native China for her doctorate in mechanical engineering. As part of her doctoral research, she worked on a project related to the biofluid transport of breast milk in lactating women. The professor running this project, Jiang's doctoral advisor, also had difficulties breastfeeding, and wanted to use her engineering knowledge to discover more about how lactation works mechanically.

Through their research, Jiang and her advisor spoke to a number of women about their breastfeeding experiences, and found that pain from breast pumping was far from unusual. So when Jiang finished her Ph.D. and came to San José State as a faculty member, she spoke to clinicians in local hospitals to continue investigating. She quickly realized that this was a problem she wanted to help solve.

"I started to look into how I could utilize my mechanical engineering background to help design a breast pump that revolutionizes the pumping experience, providing mothers the necessary comfort and also maintaining milk production," she says.

Start with a prototype

The first challenge was mechanical. A traditional breast pump is a vacuum that exerts strong (often painful) force on a woman's breast. Jiang's breast pump, however, is designed with a soft, jellyfish-like actuator that operates like a water faucet, gently compressing and massaging the breast to stimulate milk flow and then adjusting based on the flow rate detected by sensors in the pump's bottle.

As Jiang explains, "The overall surface pressure applied to the breast during the pumping will guide the AI model to adjust the vacuum and the jellyfish massage pressure." (The AI model is part of what makes Jiang's invention "smart.")

Another "smart" aspect of the new design shows the pumping mothers images and plays sounds of their infants, which can help produce and stimulate milk flow.

This is the invention Jiang is currently patenting and prototyping. She's working with a team of collaborators: a graduate student and two undergraduates as well as two co-PIs: Ish Gulati, a clinician in a neonatal care unit in the Bay Area, who's her clinical consultant, and Arlene Spilker, a pediatric nurse practitioner practicing in Los Gatos, CA, who is both a lactation and a clinical consultant for the project.

The next step post-patent is testing: once the team has adjusted the prototype to make it thinner and more flexible, they'll send their updated design to the manufacturer. When that comes back, they'll recruit volunteers (through an OB-GYN and the clinic Spilker is associated with, as well as Meta marketplace) to test this new prototype and adjust as needed.

When that prototype is perfected, they may be able to move on to the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approval process, which means submitting the invention as an assistive medical device and hoping for FDA's class three clearance. All told, the entire process will most likely take at least a year, but the invention's core design could be finalized as soon as this summer.

"One of our strengths at SJSU is the applied research that provides our students with hands-on problem solving experience that can rapidly make an impact across the globe," says Abby Queale, director of innovation for SJSU's Center of Research and Innovation. "Dr. Jiang's smart breast pump was one of the first inventions to be disclosed to the Office of Innovation and is a result of the transformative interdisciplinary collaborative research that fuses SJSU's expertise in both engineering and artificial intelligence. SJSU has filed for a patent application on this technology, and we're thrilled that Dr. Jiang is a member of our SpartUp business incubator, where we work as a team to bring ideas to the marketplace."

Measuring nutrition

But Jiang's already looking past this invention. Her second approach, which will require a separate patent, is a collaboration with biomedical engineering faculty and students: a sensor in the breast pump that allows it to detect how much fat and how many calories are in mothers' milk in real time. This will help mothers know whether the baby has gotten enough milk that day, potentially alleviating some of the pressure and stress that postpartum women face.

"My vision is that everyone would have this device on hand, and it makes breast pumping a happy experience," Jiang says. "That way the mothers feel happy, the infants feel happy and everyone benefits."

She also sees the benefits as more than just temporary.

"Postpartum women's health is very important," she adds, "because it affects a woman's life long term. I never forgot the pumping experience I had. I always felt guilty when I couldn't provide enough milk for my babies. And that guilt still kind of follows me, even though my babies are already seven and 12."

The invention grew out of her own instinct to harness her skills and experience to help others. She encourages everyone to do the same: "If we can think more about mothers' health experiences in different stages, we can provide assistive medical devices like these using our engineering technology, and that will benefit the health of all women in the long run."

Learn more about the smart breast pump and other patented inventions from SJSU faculty.

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