Dental floss designed to help monitor stress levels

Chronic stress can lead to increased blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, decreased immune function, depression, and anxiety. Existing tools used to monitor stress are often imprecise or expensive, relying on self-reporting questionnaires and psychiatric evaluations.

Sameer Sonkusale, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Tufts University, said, “It started in a collaboration with several departments across Tufts, examining how stress and other cognitive states affect problem solving and learning.

“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.”