From the inside it is not difficult to tell if you are stressed. You may feel agitated, notice that your shoulders or jaw are tense, get a headache, or even lie awake at night.
But from the outside it is a bit more difficult to measure stress objectively and in turn know how to deal with it. But that could soon change.
Scientists have just published a paper describing the creation of a wearable electronic chip that can analyze how stressed you are by detecting a particular hormone in your sweat.
“Having a reliable, portable system can help doctors objectively quantify whether a patient is suffering from depression or burnout, for example, and whether their treatment is effective,” said senior author and nanotechnology researcher from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Adrian Ionescu.
“Plus, doctors would have that information in real time. That would be a big step forward in understanding these diseases.”
The chip tracks the hormone cortisol – a steroid hormone that has long been known to be released by the adrenal glands in response to physiological stress, including physical stress or a low level of glucose in your blood.
When your body releases cortisol, triggering the stressed feelings we all know, it can be detected in saliva, sweat, and pee.
“Cortisol can be released on a whim – you feel good and suddenly something happens that puts pressure on you, and your body starts to produce more of the hormone,” says Ionescu.
The patch uses an extended gate field effect transistor (EG-FET) made of graphene to analyze small amounts of cortisol in our sweat. The transistor uses short fragments of DNA that bind to cortisol, dragging the hormone closer to the sensor.
This may sound like an exaggeration to those lucky enough to avoid persistent stress – after all, we all get stressed from time to time. But if the stress level remains high, also known as chronic stress, it can lead to various problems.
“Disorders such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, allergy, anxiety, depression, fatigue syndrome and burnout are often associated with stress axis dysfunctions,” the team wrote in their paper.
The team hopes the patch will be able to record cortisol levels over an entire day, which will show whether the patient has a normal cortisol curve or if something is wrong.
“The level of cortisol has a circadian rhythm in serum throughout the day, with the highest level in the morning (~ 30 minutes after awakening, 0.14–0.69 µM) and the lowest level at night (0.083 – 0.36 µM) stress can disrupt this rhythm and result in an abnormal rise in cortisol levels, ”the team wrote.
“Although the short-term activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is adaptive and necessary for everyday life, both high and low cortisol levels, as well as disturbed circadian rhythms, are implicated in physical and mental illness.”
You can’t go out to get one of these stress patches just yet, but the team hopes to test the sensor in a hospital trial soon. Watch this space.
The article was published in Communication material.