Inspired by the way in which a starfish flips itself over – shrinking one of its arms and using the others in a coordinated motion to right itself – a team of researchers from the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering and collaborators have created a starfish-shaped wearable device that tracks heart health in real time.
When we move, it’s more difficult for existing wearable devices to accurately track our heart activity. However, the researchers discovered that a starfish’s five-arm shape helps to solve this problem.
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Because the starfish-inspired device has multiple points touching the skin near the heart, it stays more stable than traditional wearables built as a single, unified structure, such as a smartwatch. This allows the device to collect clearer, more accurate heart data – even while the subject is moving.
The device conveniently pairs with a smartphone app to provide the user with health insights and help detect potential heart problems.
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‘Similar to a starfish, our device has five arms, each equipped with sensors that simultaneously capture both electrical and mechanical heart activity,’ said Sicheng Chen, a postdoctoral fellow. ‘Most current devices focus on capturing only one signal or require separate devices to track multiple signals at the same time. This allows us to provide a more complete picture of someone’s heart health.’
The team developed an artificial intelligence-powered system that learned from a large collection of heart data, including signals from both healthy individuals and people with heart disease. Using smart technology, the system filters out movement-related disruptions and analyses heart signals to determine if someone’s heart is healthy or showing signs of trouble. The findings are shown on the smartphone app.
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This AI-based approach correctly identifies heart conditions more than 90 per cent of the time. Because the device has Bluetooth capability, doctors can review the data remotely, making it a convenient option for at-home monitoring between medical visits. ‘This is also a benefit over traditional clinical heart tests such as the Doppler ultrasound, which usually requires patients to stay still to get accurate results,’ Chen said.
The team is also improving the long-term wearability of these devices. ‘A big challenge with wearable devices is that they can cause skin irritation when worn for long periods,’ said Zheng Yan , an associate professor in the College of Engineering and a Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health building researcher.
To address this, Yan’s team is working on making the device more comfortable and skin friendly. Right now, the device sticks to the skin using a special gel, but future versions will use a breathable, skin-friendly material for more comfort. Yan’s team has been improving this material for the past few years.
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The starfish-inspired device can also charge wirelessly while still being worn, ensuring continuous use without needing to remove it for charging.
While still in early development, the starfish-inspired innovation brings together nature, engineering and AI in a way that could change how we manage heart health – making it easier and more reliable for people to track their heart activity anytime, anywhere.
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The research has been published in Science Advances.