News | Everyday dental floss becomes a high-tech sensor in a breakthrough for precise stress monitoring
Chronic stress can raise blood pressure, contribute to cardiovascular disease, weaken immune function, and cause depression and anxiety. Current stress-monitoring tools, however, are often expensive and rely on subjective assessment, making it difficult to measure a person’s true physiological state accurately.
To address this challenge, a multidisciplinary team at Tufts University in the US developed a new dental-floss sensor that detects the stress hormone cortisol in saliva during everyday flossing. It offers a noninvasive, highly accurate, and relatively low-cost approach to stress monitoring.
“While studying how stress affects cognition and learning, we found that measurement itself often becomes an additional source of stress,” said electrical and computer engineering professor Sameer Sonkusale. “We therefore considered whether a sensor could fit completely into daily life without adding burden. Saliva contains cortisol, and the routine use of dental floss makes it an ideal monitoring tool.”
The device resembles an ordinary floss pick, with a plastic handle and a taut filament at both ends, and is about the size of an index finger. Through capillary action, the floss absorbs saliva and directs it to an electrode-sensing area inside the device, where cortisol molecules are captured and detected through specialized molecular recognition.
The key technology, called electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers (eMIPs), was first developed 30 years ago. It works like a plaster mold: cortisol serves as the template molecule while a polymer with a “remembered shape” forms around it. Removing the template leaves binding sites closely matched to the target molecule, enabling highly selective recognition and capture.
“eMIP is a transformative technology,” Sonkusale said. “Previous biosensors often relied on expensive bioreceptors such as antibodies, while eMIP can quickly create a dedicated recognition membrane for any target molecule. This greatly shortens development time and reduces cost.”
The team said the floss sensor is as sensitive as the best stress-detection devices on the market and can be used at home without professional training, integrating stress monitoring into routine health management. The highly scalable eMIP technology could also detect other salivary biomarkers, such as estrogen for fertility tracking, glucose for diabetes monitoring, or cancer-related molecules, and may eventually measure several biomarkers at once.
Although the device performs well for monitoring, Sonkusale emphasized that its main use is disease management and continuous tracking, not diagnosis. “Blood testing remains the gold standard for diagnosis. But after a diagnosis such as cardiovascular disease, a floss sensor could be very valuable for tracking treatment response and enabling timely intervention.”
The team is planning a startup to commercialize the sensor. The findings were published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
The floss sensor adds to the Sonkusale team’s wearable-sensor innovations, including flexible electronics that detect sweat metabolites and gases, track movement, and can even be woven into textiles.
News | Everyday dental floss becomes a high-tech sensor in a breakthrough for precise stress monitoring
News | Everyday dental floss becomes a high-tech sensor in a breakthrough for precise stress monitoring
Chronic stress can raise blood pressure, contribute to cardiovascular disease, weaken immune function, and cause depression and anxiety. Current stress-monitoring tools, however, are often expensive and rely on subjective assessment, making it difficult to measure a person’s true physiological state accurately.
To address this challenge, a multidisciplinary team at Tufts University in the US developed a new dental-floss sensor that detects the stress hormone cortisol in saliva during everyday flossing. It offers a noninvasive, highly accurate, and relatively low-cost approach to stress monitoring.
“While studying how stress affects cognition and learning, we found that measurement itself often becomes an additional source of stress,” said electrical and computer engineering professor Sameer Sonkusale. “We therefore considered whether a sensor could fit completely into daily life without adding burden. Saliva contains cortisol, and the routine use of dental floss makes it an ideal monitoring tool.”
The device resembles an ordinary floss pick, with a plastic handle and a taut filament at both ends, and is about the size of an index finger. Through capillary action, the floss absorbs saliva and directs it to an electrode-sensing area inside the device, where cortisol molecules are captured and detected through specialized molecular recognition.
The key technology, called electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers (eMIPs), was first developed 30 years ago. It works like a plaster mold: cortisol serves as the template molecule while a polymer with a “remembered shape” forms around it. Removing the template leaves binding sites closely matched to the target molecule, enabling highly selective recognition and capture.
“eMIP is a transformative technology,” Sonkusale said. “Previous biosensors often relied on expensive bioreceptors such as antibodies, while eMIP can quickly create a dedicated recognition membrane for any target molecule. This greatly shortens development time and reduces cost.”
The team said the floss sensor is as sensitive as the best stress-detection devices on the market and can be used at home without professional training, integrating stress monitoring into routine health management. The highly scalable eMIP technology could also detect other salivary biomarkers, such as estrogen for fertility tracking, glucose for diabetes monitoring, or cancer-related molecules, and may eventually measure several biomarkers at once.
Although the device performs well for monitoring, Sonkusale emphasized that its main use is disease management and continuous tracking, not diagnosis. “Blood testing remains the gold standard for diagnosis. But after a diagnosis such as cardiovascular disease, a floss sensor could be very valuable for tracking treatment response and enabling timely intervention.”
The team is planning a startup to commercialize the sensor. The findings were published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
The floss sensor adds to the Sonkusale team’s wearable-sensor innovations, including flexible electronics that detect sweat metabolites and gases, track movement, and can even be woven into textiles.
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