Post-graduate students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) have developed an app to support babies in need of breast milk.
Dr Melissa Densmore, a senior lecturer in the university’s Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D), decided to share her excess breast milk with babies in need. This inspired her students to develop an app for Milk Matters, a non-profit human milk bank.
Densmore told IOL that her milk donations were the start of the relationship between the university and Milk Matters, which had seen her supervising five students who had undertaken research on and for the milk bank.
In 2016, two students designed an app that helped facilitate donations and communication and now three other student are building on that research with an aim to make the app more widely available, and make it easy and cost-effective for the non-profit to share interesting and current information.
Donated breast milk is often given to premature babies, who are particularly vulnerable to fatal complications if they are not fed breast milk.
