The Nifty Feeding Cup
The Nifty Feeding Cup: An innovation to optimize feeding in infants with breastfeeding difficulties.
More than 9 million infants are born every year with breast feeding difficulties in low resource settings. Feeding devices used for such infants in high-resource settings such as nasogastric tubes and bottles are impractical and unhygienic in settings that lack clean water and electricity. The WHO and UNICEF recommend hand expression of breast milk and the use of a small cup to feed newborns with breastfeeding difficulties in low-resource settings, yet no standard infant feeding cup exists. To address this need, we designed The Nifty Feeding Cup. The Nifty Feeding Cup’s simple, unique shape has an extended reservoir off the cup lip that optimizes the efficient delivery of milk and is sized (40ml) for direct hand expression of breast milk. The design enables rapid, optimal intake, minimizes spillages, reduces stress and fatigue, and ensures sufficient nutrition to survive and grow. It is silicone, reusable, boilable and soft. At $1 per cup it is accessible worldwide.