Researchers marry art and engineering to create a truly comfortable, wearable health monitoring system.

Everyone is pretty familiar with origami, the Japanese art of folding squares of paper into often cute and adorable shapes. But throw in some scissors with that folding and what you get is essentially origami in 3D: kirigami. This ancient Asian art form is believed to have popped as a way to honor the gods and one’s ancestors. Now in the 21st century, scientists are harnessing it to inspire modern engineering and health care. Case in point: A team of Japanese researchers used the cutting and folding techniques pioneered by kirigami to create a new kind of wearable heart sensor that can move with the human body with great flexibility and breathability when strapped on. The new heart sensor, described Tuesday in the journal Applied Physics Review, aims to transform the future of medical monitoring devices into something that blends more effortlessly into our everyday lives.

In recent years, scientists have turned to kirigami to make robots that can grasp items more effectively, and fabricate sensors that can sense injuries in real-time. While there are a plethora of wearable gadgets on the market that can track heart rate and electrical activity, it’s hard to ensure they are resilient under changing conditions and do not create discomfort for users, Kuniharu Takei, an electrical engineer at Osaka Prefecture University who lead the new study, told The Daily Beast in an email.

To overcome these challenges, Takei and his team took a stiff film material called polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and cut and folded it into a shape they found to be the optimal ratio of stretch and airiness. They embedded the material with electrodes that could be used to pick up heart activity—and thus a heart sensor was born.

Healthy volunteers donned the new heart sensor to put it through its paces, wearing it during everyday movements like walking or working at a desk. They found the sensor worked best when there wasn’t too much background noise, like when someone was at rest. But it still picked up electrical activity pretty accurately and was stable even during exercise. The heart sensor was also able to wirelessly transmit heart rate data without any issue. The researchers even developed and tested out a smartphone app that could make it easy for users to keep track of these readings on their own.

Takei and his team believe the biggest uses for the new sensor could be for health care providers to remotely monitor patients with heart conditions that cause abnormal or irregular electrical activity. But he cautioned that the sensor is still a work-in-progress. It can’t go toe-to-toe with an EKG machine you might find in a hospital.

“We are planning to integrate multiple sensors with [our] electrocardiogram sensor,” he said. “By analyzing multiple sensor outputs and correlation, we would like to find the early stage of disease and also use telemedicine applications.”

Takei anticipates tacking on more sensors might hamper the sensor's flexibility and comfortable design, but his team is tinkering on some workarounds. Once a complete prototype is available, it might serve as a prime example of how ancient art forms could bolster the efficiency and application of other kinds of modern technologies.

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