Hackathon aims to invent breast pumps that don't suck
JENNY BOURBEAU is frustrated. For the last 10 months, the Massachusetts mother has been expressing breast milk for her young son. Like many mothers, she needed to use a pump but found the experience impersonal and difficult.
"I spent a lot of time with the pump and the process, thinking about how much it sucks and how it could be better and wondering why it isn't yet," she says.
Last weekend, Bourbeau, her son, and more than 150 engineers, designers, healthcare specialists and parents gathered at the MIT Media Lab for a hackathon called Make the Breast Pump Not Suck. Their goal: to spend two days radically reimagining the device that innovation forgot. The design has changed little since portable pumps became widely available more than 20 years ago.
