Stress affects nearly everyone at some point, but when it becomes chronic, it can cause serious health problems.
Long-term stress can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, weaker immune systems, anxiety, and depression.
Doctors and scientists have tried many ways to track stress levels, but most tools are either not accurate, too expensive, or difficult to use.
Often, stress is measured using surveys or interviews, which may not always reflect what’s really going on in the body.
Now, researchers at Tufts University have developed a new and simple way to measure stress right at home—by using a smart dental floss pick.
This device can detect levels of cortisol, a hormone that rises when a person is stressed.
The lead scientist, Professor Sameer Sonkusale, explained that they wanted to study how stress affects learning and problem-solving. But they also didn’t want their method of measuring stress to add more stress. So, they asked: can we make a sensor that fits easily into daily life?
Since cortisol can be found in saliva, and flossing is already a common routine, using floss to collect a sample made perfect sense.
The smart floss pick looks just like an ordinary one—plastic with two prongs and floss stretched across—but it works in a unique way.
When a person flosses, saliva is pulled into the handle through a tiny channel. Inside the handle, the saliva flows over a sensor that checks cortisol levels.
The sensor uses a special technology known as eMIP, short for electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers. This clever idea works a bit like making a mold of your hand. First, scientists make a mold around a cortisol molecule.
Then, they remove the cortisol, leaving behind little spaces that match its shape. These spaces can later trap any new cortisol that comes along, making it easy to measure.
Even more exciting, this method is flexible. The same type of sensor can be used to detect other important health markers in saliva, like estrogen for tracking fertility, glucose for diabetes, or even early signs of cancer. In the future, the floss might be able to check for several of these markers at once.
According to Professor Sonkusale, this technology could change how we track stress and health.
In the past, creating sensors meant a lot of effort to make antibodies that attach to specific chemicals. But eMIP makes it much quicker and easier to create a new sensor when a new health marker is discovered.
Tests show that this floss sensor is just as accurate as the best stress sensors currently available. And because it’s easy to use, people won’t need any training to check their stress levels.
This could help many people monitor their health more regularly and catch problems early. The Tufts research team is now working on turning the invention into a product that people can buy.
However, the researchers explain that while this floss sensor is very good at tracking stress over time, it is not meant to diagnose diseases. For diagnosis, blood tests are still the most reliable. But once a person has been diagnosed, the floss sensor could help them and their doctors see how well treatments are working.
For example, someone with heart disease could track how their stress changes with medication or lifestyle changes.
The study was published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. It adds to other inventions from the same Tufts lab, such as sensors in clothing that can track movement, sweat, or even detect gases in the air.
This innovation could make stress tracking as simple as brushing your teeth. With continued research and development, the day when we check our stress levels while flossing may not be far away.
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