The key requirements

• Monitoring: the sleeve has to measure and register the date and time, the duration of the feeding, the amount of milk and the angle of the bottle, among other things.
• Bluetooth connectivity: the sleeve must connect to a special app, which can give parents personalised nutritional advice.
• Temperature: the device has to function well in environmental temperatures ranging from 1 to 40° Celsius.
• Safety: the product has to be safe for babies and children and it must be possible to clean it with water.
• Visual: the product must have the look and feel of a premium device that meets the Philips standard.

Challenges during the engineering process

“This is a unique product,” says Tim Franssen, who is involved in the project as an international account manager and specialist in personal care. “Our engineers faced some interesting challenges during the project. Take the environmental temperature, for example. When it is very hot or extremely cold, some plastic materials can start to ‘move.’ They will shrink or expand. You cannot see it happen, but the effect is significant enough to affect the reliability of the weighing function. To compensate for this effect, we developed a special algorithm that ensures the sleeve always gives a reliable readout.”

Testing the product

According to Tim, another remarkable aspect of this project is that Rompa Group was also responsible for all compliance and verification tests. “Before you can launch a product like this on the European market, you need a CE certification. In order to acquire this certification, the product has to pass several tests, e.g. pertaining to its safety and functionality. The Bluetooth connection, for example, has to perform well under different circumstances. We also ran hundreds of test hours in our own test centre to prove the product’s reliability and repeatability.”