SBIR-STTR Award

Many infants have a suspected allergy or metabolic abnormality that requires a transition to a therapeutic new diet. Often these diets are rejected by infants for a period of time, presumably because they are novel or distasteful. Diet rejection can also occur with more common diet transitions. The effectiveness of our methods and devise will be tested with in infants between the ages of four and six months. The infants' sucking of normal diet and a novel test diet will first be determined. Then following three days of training with our devise, infants will again be assessed to determine if sucking has been facilitated. A delayed test six days later will be used to examine the longevity of the effect. The proposed research will test the effectiveness in facilitating transition between diets in infants with a device and method derived from basic research on the biological psychology of learning and developed by our company.Proposed commercial application:As a commercial product, this device has the potential to enhance the transitions of infants to new diets, greatly reduce the disruption of switching to a new diet, facilitate the introduction of necessary supplements, and reduce the cost and duration of treatment of children requiring such intervention. Here we propose to test the potential effectiveness of our product.National institute of Human Development (NIHD)

Healthy infants often change diets. In addition many infants have a suspected allergy or metabolic abnormality that requires a transition to a therapeutic diet. Often these new diets are rejected by infants for a period of time. The effectiveness of our method and device will be tested with infants between the ages of 1 and 5 months. The infants sucking of normal and novel diet will first be determined. Then following 1 to 7 days of training with our device infants will again be tested to determine if sucking has been facilitated. A delayed test of up to 24 days will be used to examine the longevity of the effect. We will test healthy babies and those required to switch diets by a physician. The method and device derived from basic research on the biological psychology of learning were further developed by our company.Proposed commercial application:As a Commercial product, this device has the potential to enhance the transition of infants to new diets, greatly reduce the disruption of switching to a new diet, facilitate the introduction of necessary supplements, and reduce the cost and duration of treatment of children requiring such intervention. He we intend to demonstrate and optimize the effectiveness of our product.Thesaurus termschild behavior, conditioning, developmental nutrition, infant human (0-1 year), method development, nutrient intake activity, olfactory stimulus behavioral /social science research tag, human subject, nutrition related tagNational Institute of Child and Human Development (NICHD)