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Prototype

Building a Better Breast Pump, Not a Milking Machine

The Naya Health breast pump is meant to more closely approximate nursing a baby.Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times

It resembles a piece of farm equipment. It’s cumbersome, heavy and noisy. Its users must be partly nude. It’s made of a web of tubes and funnels that could have been designed by Rube Goldberg. It’s the breast pump.

Since it was created 60 years ago by a male Swedish inventor, the modern mechanical breast pump has kept more or less the same design. The traditional pump uses air-based suction to stimulate milk production — but for many women, it doesn’t come close to simulating breast-feeding.

Indignation over the shortcomings of the breast pump inspired an article in The New York Times calling for a better design and prompted a Massachusetts Institute of Technology hackathon in 2014 called Make the Breast Pump Not Suck, for which more than a thousand new ideas were submitted. The subtitle of a research paper written by the hackathon’s organizers read, “When I first saw a breast pump I was wondering if it was a joke.”

Recently, several new companies have put serious effort into designing more discreet, efficient, comfortable and technologically sophisticated breast pumps. Along with reimagining and re-engineering them, they have also created smartphone apps to help with related tasks like tracking milk production.

Among these newcomers are Naya Health, based in Silicon Valley, and Babyation, based in St. Louis. Both companies are led by husband-and-wife teams, and the new designs have relied on input and feedback from breast-feeding women, including the companies’ own founders.

Naya Health’s hospital-grade breast pump was designed by Jeff Alvarez, a medical-device engineer, and his wife, Janica, a clinical researcher in the pharmaceutical industry. The couple have three children, and they spent a few years thinking about how to make a better breast pump before Mr. Alvarez had a creative breakthrough.

One day, while working on robotic ophthalmological surgical devices, he realized that a fluid valve used in cataract surgery could be applied to breast pumps. Mr. Alvarez shared the idea with his wife that night, and then promptly disappeared into his workshop.

“I built something out of washers, a piece of plastic, a latex glove, some duct tape, a syringe and a tube,” he said. When he presented the contraption to Ms. Alvarez, they tested it out and found that it worked.

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Jeff and Janica Alvarez founded Naya Health to develop and market a better breast pump. Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times

“He was able to kind of crank the syringe like a plunger and to extract milk,” said Ms. Alvarez. They went on to create more sophisticated prototypes using 3-D printers.

Their breast pump, called the Smart Pump by Naya Health, uses a water-based suction system that they say is more efficient and more closely resembles the sensation of natural breast-feeding.

“It feels more like you’re nursing a baby versus nursing a machine,” Ms. Alvarez says.

The pump communicates with a smartphone app that measures milk output and that the Alvarezes eventually plan to sync with a “smart” baby bottle they are developing that gauges a baby’s milk consumption.

The pump was set to go on sale on Friday; the retail price is $599.

Samantha Rudolph and Jared Miller have also devised their own new breast pump. Ms. Rudolph, who previously worked in business development and strategic business planning for ESPN, and Mr. Miller, an electrical engineer by training, spent most of 2014 researching and developing designs.

The breast-pump flaws that they specifically focused on were the noisiness, the lack of modern technology and “the fact that the bottles hang off the breast, so there’s really no way for discretion,” Ms. Rudolph said.

Their design includes a soft piece of silicon, a breast shield, that is held in place against the breast by a bra. Tubing runs under the woman’s clothing to milk bottles that can be stored in a purse or on a desk. Another tube connects to a case that contains a battery-powered motor.

“This whole assembly is portable,” Mr. Miller said. “You can be in a meeting, you can be walking your dog, you can be on the street, you can be sitting on the couch. You pump however you want to, on your own terms.”

A year ago they founded Babyation, and last month, they conducted a Kickstarter campaign through which they received 140 preorders. They plan to sell the Babyation pump for $450 and to begin delivering pumps to customers in March 2017.

Some of the more established pump makers are also starting to make sleeker models. Several years ago, the Swiss company Medela came out with a portable battery-powered model called the Freestyle that was designed to pump milk more efficiently. And last year Medela introduced a smartphone app that tracks pumping sessions and provides educational information on breast-feeding.

Demand for breast pumps is on the rise, said Catherine D’Ignazio, one of the organizers of the M.I.T. hackathon and a research affiliate at the M.I.T. Center for Civic Media. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2013 “Breastfeeding Report Card,” 77 percent of new mothers breast-fed their babies. A new study shows that the global market for breast pumps is expected to reach $1.2 billion by 2020.

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Prototypes of breast pump components in the Alvarezes’ garage.Credit...Damien Maloney for The New York Times

Helping increase demand is health insurance coverage for breast pumps, which began in 2013 under the Affordable Care Act. Medela experienced a reported 34 percent increase in sales in the two years after the law went into effect. The company, which is privately held, declined to confirm the figure.

Working mothers are partly responsible for the increase. Mothers of premature babies who cannot latch onto the breast for feeding, and those who otherwise struggle to breast-feed, are also “a huge and growing population of exclusive pumpers,” Ms. D’Ignazio said.

But new female-centric products can be a difficult sell to prospective investors, many of whom, particularly in venture capital circles, are male.

“It’s going to be very hard for that particular investor to put himself in the mind of a user,” said Vincent Ponzo, director of the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School.

Gaining traction for a product is one way to help woo investors. A successful Kickstarter campaign, for example, can turn the tide.

“Being able to show that a product resonates with the market either through the money you’ve raised or the number of people who have engaged with it, that’s leverage, that’s proof of concept,” Mr. Ponzo said of crowdfunding success stories.

Both Naya Health and Babyation have received grant money, and Babyation raised $81,000 through a Kickstarter campaign. Naya Health has attracted both male and female investors, including angel and institutional investors and venture capitalists. It has raised a total of $4 million.

Ms. Alvarez said she was very careful about pitching Naya Health’s breast pump. She tries to target potential investors with “some sort of emotional connection to the technology and the story,” she said.

As Mr. Ponzo points out, some financiers will automatically get it.

Among the ranks of potential angel investors, for instance, are “plenty of women out there who have used breast pumps and can empathize with the need for a better one,” he said.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be venture capital or nothing. There’s a lot in between. Finding people who can see the vision and the potential is a really good place to start.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section BU, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Better Breast Pump, Not a Milking Machine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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