lilac: a breastfeeding aid

Context

This project was part of MIT’s mechanical engineering capstone, 2.009, which is focused on product development. Teams of about 20 students spend the semester ideating, building, and testing a product. I was part of the purple team, whose eventual focus became creating a breastfeeding device that simulated natural breastfeeding, and was geared towards babies who cannot latch onto a breast without assistance.

Process

We spent over a month iterating on different ideas for a breast feeding aid, including compression techniques and different methods for integrating feeding onto the breast. We ultimately settled on a design that allowed for greatest intimacy between mother and child, which we determined to be the most important factor based on our user tests with mothers.

Our device functions much like standard breast pumps, however, it has a feeding component consisting of a plastic nipple, which a baby can easily bite to release milk. The feeding system has a sensor which is able to detect the height of milk built up in the device and stop the pump if the mother is producing milk faster than the baby is eating.

For this project, I worked specifically on fittings and interfaces between the components, conducting user interviews, and working on our business model for the final presentation.