Does stimulating multiple senses (such as hearing, touch, taste, smell) of premature babies improve growth and healthy development or reduce the risk of death?

Key messages

• Multisensory stimulation (the stimulation of more than one sense at a time) may support growth in preterm infants by increasing weight gain before discharge from the hospital. However, it is unclear whether it improves longer-term developmental outcomes or reduces the risk of death, as the available evidence is limited and uncertain.

• When compared with stimulation of a single sense (touch alone), it is uncertain whether multisensory stimulation is better than touch alone at increasing weight gain during the intervention.

What is multisensory stimulation, and how does it work?

Multisensory stimulation means giving premature babies experiences that activate two or more of their senses. The senses involved and the types of stimulation used include the sense of:

• hearing — a parent’s voice, singing, or calming music;

• touch — massage or passive movements;

• smell and taste — a mother’s scent or breast milk;

• balance — gentle rocking or changing the baby's position;

• sight — soft, cycled lighting and simple shapes, colors, or moving patterns.

During the newborn period, the brain grows very quickly. Providing positive sensory experiences at this time may help premature babies in several ways, such as supporting their memory, helping them regulate emotions, and improving early learning and development.

What did we want to find out?

We wanted to find out whether multisensory stimulation compared with single‑sense stimulation or standard care helps premature babies survive, grow, stay healthy, and develop well. Specifically, we wanted to find out whether multisensory stimulation might:

• reduce the number of babies with severe developmental problems at 18 to 24 months' age, such as cerebral palsy, delay in development, limitations in mental abilities, blindness, or deafness;

• reduce the number of babies who die during the newborn period or before hospital discharge;

• increase the amount of weight the infants gained by the time they left the hospital.

We also looked at other important measures of the babies’ health, including:

• how long they stayed in the hospital or in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU);

• how long it took before they could feed fully by mouth;

• how many days they needed breathing support.

What did we do?

We searched for studies in which multisensory stimulation began before the baby was discharged from the hospital after birth, and which compared multisensory stimulation with:

• no intervention or standard care;

• single-sense stimulation.

We summarized the results of the studies and rated our confidence in the evidence, based on factors, such as the size of the study (number of babies enrolled) and the methods used.

What did we find?

We included 19 studies (1544 premature babies). Eighteen of these studies compared multisensory stimulation with standard care, and one study compared multisensory stimulation with a single‑sense intervention (touch only).

In 10 studies, the main goal was to examine how multisensory stimulation affects babies’ brain and behavioral development.

The remaining nine studies focused on weight gain during the intervention, weight gain prior to hospital discharge, length of stay in the NICU, total length of hospital stay, time until the baby could feed fully by mouth, number of days the baby needed breathing support, or a combination of these measures.

We also found 13 ongoing studies and 4 studies that have not yet been fully assessed. They may give us more useful information in the future.

Main results

None of the studies that compared multisensory stimulation with no intervention reported on the critical outcome major developmental disability at 18 to 24 months' corrected age. Only one study assessed a related outcome, cerebral palsy at 12 months. Because this study was very small, the evidence is very uncertain about whether multisensory stimulation modifies the risk of cerebral palsy.

Multisensory stimulation may result in little or no difference in death before hospital discharge, although it was reported in only one large study. It may increase total weight gain prior to discharge, but the observed effect is small, and its clinical significance remains uncertain.

Compared with single-sense stimulation (touch), we could not tell whether multisensory stimulation helped babies gain more weight during the intervention. The only study we found comparing a multi- to single-sensory intervention did not report the critical outcomes, such as major developmental problems at 18 to 24 months' corrected age, death during the first hospital stay, or total weight gain prior to discharge.

What are the limitations of the evidence?

We have limited confidence in these findings because many of the studies were small or not well-designed. Several studies did not report the outcomes we were most interested in or did not provide enough data for us to analyze. Because of these limitations, the true effects of multisensory stimulation may be different from what we found.

How up-to-date is this evidence?

The evidence is up-to-date to 28 November 2025.