AI-Enhanced Heart Monitoring Tech Inspired by Real Star

Heart activity tracking is a noble idea in theory. But in reality, such tracking can be difficult due to wearable devices’ limitations, particularly in monitoring heart activity while the body is active or physically moving.

University of Missouri researchers, however, are taking a cue from nature to solve this problem.

Inspired by the way a starfish flips itself over—shrinking one of its arms and using the others in a coordinated motion to right itself—Sicheng Chen and Zheng Yan in Mizzou’s College of Engineering and collaborators have created a starfish-shaped wearable device that tracks heart health in real time.

The starfish-inspired device has multiple points touching the skin near the heart, so it stays more stable than traditional wearables built as a single, unified structure like as a smartwatch. This allows the device to collect clearer, more accurate heart data, even while its user is moving.

The device pairs with a smartphone app to provide health insights and help detect potential heart problems.

“Similar to a starfish, our device has five arms, each equipped with sensors that simultaneously capture both electrical and mechanical heart activity,” said Chen, a postdoctoral fellow 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.”

AI for Smarter Heart Monitoring

The research team developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system that learned from a large collection of heart data, including signals from both healthy individuals and those with heart disease. Using smart technology, the system filters out movement-related disruptions and analyzes heart signals to determine if a particular patient’s heart is healthy. Findings are shown on the smartphone app.

This AI-based approach correctly identifies heart conditions more than 90% of the time, the researchers claim. The device has Bluetooth capability, thus enabling doctors to review the data remotely and allowing patients to monitor their heart activity between medical visits.

“This is also a benefit over traditional clinical heart tests such as the Doppler ultrasound, which usually requires patients to stay still to get accurate results,” Chen said.

The team is also improving the devices’ long-term wearability.

“A big challenge with wearable devices is that they can cause skin irritation when worn for long periods,” said Yan, an associate professor in Mizzou’s College of Engineering and a Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health building researcher.

To address this, Yan’s team is working on making the device more comfortable and skin friendly. The device currently sticks to the skin using a special gel, but future versions will use a breathable, skin-friendly material for more comfort. Yan’s team has been improving this material for the past few years.

The starfish-inspired device can also charge wirelessly while still being worn, ensuring continuous use without needing to remove it for charging.

While still in early development, the starfish-inspired innovation brings together nature, engineering and AI in a way that could change how we manage heart health — making it easier and more reliable for people to track their heart activity anytime, anywhere.

“Starfish-inspired wearable bioelectronic systems for physiological signal monitoring during motion and real-time heart disease diagnosis,” was published in Science Advances. Other co-authors are Qunle Ouyang, Xuanbo Miao, Zehua Chen, Ganggang Zhao, Sandeep Gautam and Jianlin Cheng at Mizzou.