Every year, World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA) sponsors a campaign to educate the public about the benefits of breast-feeding. This year, the theme is “breastfeeding and work,” a topic that’s on the minds of many breast-feeding mothers who must return to the workplace, soon after the baby is born and, is there a better breast pump?
One startup company thinks it can make things a bit easier for moms. Kohana is a company that was birthed, so to speak, from the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” Hackathon, a weekend-long brainstorming session hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September 2014. The point of the hackathon was very straightforward: design a better breast pump – a pump that doesn’t make a woman feel like her breasts are being attacked by a vacuum cleaner, and a pump that is more discreet than the giant milking machines now on the market.
Kohana’s Gala pump was a direct result of the MIT Hackathon. Rather than creating a vacuum suction between the breast and the plastic cone of the pump, the Gala pump uses compression to draw milk from the glands at the base of the breast. The electric pump mimics the technique of hand compression, which women have been using for centuries to extract milk from lactating breasts, without the use of heavy machinery. This pump also could keep nursing moms out of bathroom stalls and storage closets. Kohana’s battery-operated pump comes with a special bra that has extra room in each cup for “inflatable bladders.” These little bags fill up with milk when you turn the pump on or start manually pumping. Setting up the device simply involves inserting the milk-collecting bags inside the bra and then turning the pump on. After that, mothers can button up their shirts and get back to work.
The Kickstarter campaign that could bring this new, mom-friendly tech to stores is up and running until Aug. 13. Funds from the crowdfunding site will be used to conduct a small trial comparing women using both conventional vacuum pumps and Kohana’s compression pump……
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