Physical movement can make it challenging for current wearable devices to accurately track heart activity. Now, a starfish’s five-arm shape has helped resolve this issue.

Inspired by the starfish's ability to flip itself over by retracting one arm and using the others in a coordinated motion, a team from the University of Missouri (Columbia, MO, USA) and their collaborators have developed a starfish-shaped wearable device that can track heart health in real time. Unlike traditional wearables, such as smartwatches, which are built as a single, unified structure, the starfish-inspired design touches the skin at multiple points near the heart. This improves stability, ensuring the device collects more accurate and reliable heart data, even while in motion. The device pairs with a smartphone app, which provides health insights and helps identify potential heart problems.

The team also created an AI-powered system that learned from a broad set of heart data, including signals from both healthy individuals and those with heart conditions. Using smart technology, the system filters out disturbances caused by movement and analyzes the heart signals to determine if a person’s heart is healthy or showing signs of trouble. The results are displayed on the connected smartphone app. This AI-based method correctly identifies heart issues in over 90% of cases. Thanks to Bluetooth capability, doctors can remotely review the data, making it a convenient tool for home monitoring between medical visits. The team is also working on improving the long-term wearability of the device.

One of the major challenges with wearables is skin irritation when they are worn for extended periods. To address this, the team is focused on making the device more comfortable and skin-friendly. Currently, the device adheres to the skin with a special gel, but future iterations will use a breathable, more skin-friendly material for improved comfort. The team has been refining this material for several years. Additionally, the starfish-inspired device can charge wirelessly while being worn, ensuring continuous use without the need to remove it for charging. While still in the early stages of development, this innovative, starfish-inspired device, presented in Science Advances, combines nature, engineering, and AI in a way that could revolutionize heart health management—allowing people to track their heart activity more reliably and conveniently at anytime, anywhere.

“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 in Mizzou’s College of Engineering and lead author. “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.” 

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