Tufts engineers want to sell you stress-tracking dental floss

A Tufts interdisciplinary engineer and his team have devised a dental floss with built-in sensors that can accurately measure a stress hormone in real time.

The device looks just like a regular dental floss pick, but this one only has built-in electrodes that can detect cortisol, a so-called stress hormone.

“We didn’t want measurement to create an additional source of stress, so we thought, can we make a sensing device that becomes part of your day-to-day routine? Cortisol is a stress marker found in saliva, so flossing seemed like a natural fit to take a daily sample,” said Sameer Sonkusale, an electrical and computer engineering professor.

The technology behind the measurement – electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers (eMIPs) – was developed 30 years ago.

“A polymer is formed around a template molecule, in this case cortisol, which is later removed to leave behind binding sites,” Sonkusale continued.

“These sites have a physical and chemical shape ‘memory’ of the target molecule, so they can bind free-floating molecules that are coming in. The eMIP molds are versatile, so one can create dental floss sensors that detect other molecules that can be found in saliva, such as estrogen for fertility tracking, glucose for diabetes monitoring, or markers for cancer.”

It’s possible to detect multiple biomarkers simultaneously, which means the technology could be used to monitor stress, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other conditions.

Sonkusale and his colleagues are now working on establishing a startup to commercialize the technology.

“For diagnostics, blood is still the gold standard, but once you are diagnosed and put on medication, if you need to track, say, a cardiovascular condition over time to see if your heart health is improving, then monitoring with the sensor can be easy and allows for timely interventions when needed.”