Feeding looks different for every baby, but when your little one struggles to finish a bottle, gags or leaks milk or takes over 30 minutes to feed, it’s easy to feel frustrated and confused. Feeding may be one of the most basic human instincts, but that doesn’t mean it’s always automatic, especially for newborns who are still learning to coordinate sucking, swallowing and breathing.
Just like walking or talking, feeding is a skill. And when babies face developmental delays, muscle tone issues or structural challenges like tethered oral tissues, it takes time—and the right support—to get feeding on track. The good news? There’s a way to understand exactly what’s happening during each bottle feed.
A connected bottle for better feeding insight
nfant® Thrive Bottle is the only bottle system FDA-cleared to measure tongue movement during feeding. It uses safe, noninvasive technology to assess your baby’s feeding skill in real time, so you can understand your baby’s coordination, track improvement over time, and gauge whether interventions like therapy or tongue-tie releases are needed.
When paired with nfant® Control Flow Nipples, the system also offers the most consistent and reliable flow rates for breast milk, formula, and thickened feeds, making it easier to match the nipple to your baby’s current feeding ability.
nfant® has spent more than a decade helping clinicians and parents understand and improve infant feeding outcomes. Our hospital-grade technology is used by pediatric feeding specialists, speech-language pathologists, and NICUs nationwide—and now it’s available for you to use at home.
Whether you’re working with a care team or just trying to figure out feeding on your own, Thrive Bottle gives you real, actionable insights, so you can stop guessing and start making informed decisions that support your baby’s growth and development.
How nfant Thrive Bottle works
Every time an infant feeds, a complex sequence of muscle movements occurs, requiring coordination between the tongue, lips, jaw, and hard/soft palate. Proper suck-swallow-breathe patterns depend on both tongue strength and neuromuscular control. The nfant® Thrive Bottle objectively measures these movements in real time.
- Inside the bottle, a cantilever mechanism responds to the baby’s sucking motion, triggering movement that is detected by the Bottle Sensor at the base of the bottle.
- The sensor wirelessly transmits feeding data to the nfant® Thrive Tracker App, which translates the movements into key clinical metrics, including peak amplitude, duration, and frequency—giving you a quantifiable view of the baby’s feeding ability.
Measuring muscle movement
Each time your baby feeds, a complex set of muscle movements takes place, driven by your baby’s tongue. This suck-swallow-breathe pattern involves careful coordination among the lips, jaw and hard/soft palate. The nfant® Thrive Bottle measures and tracks these movements with a cantilever that fits into the top of the nipple.
Converting movements to data
As your baby sucks on the nipple and swallows, these muscle movements cause the cantilever to move and gently tap the drum at the bottom of the bottle. The wireless Sensor connects to this piece.
