Payam Seyed Kalateh
Isfahan University of Medical Science, Iran
Title: Studying the validity and reliability of infant sucking tester instrument
Biography
Biography: Payam Seyed Kalateh
Abstract
The importance of controlling primary sucking skills has been emphasized for years and the need for reliable tools for newborn babies sucking has been mentioned in several researches. In this study, we investigate the functionality of IST device in order to evaluate babies suckling. In this research, sucking of a group of healthy babies with 20 members and a group of premature babies with 15 members were investigated by IST device. In the end, sucking characteristics of healthy babies for the first and second tests were compared. They were also compared with the test carried out for premature babies. In this research, the mean of data associated with the test and retest of healthy babies was calculated separately and compared. The comparison which we made and the obtained P-value=0.460 show repeatability or reliability of the device. Also, the means related to the sucking of premature babies were also analyzed using T-test and were compared with those of healthy babies. This comparison showed that P-value equals which is meaningful and verifies the difference between sucking characteristics of healthy and premature babies. IST device is a powerful and useful tool for studying the sucking characteristics of healthy and premature babies. Also the new version of this instrument can assess nutritive and non-nutritive sucking from bottle, sucking from nipple of mother and finger feeding.