Hair loss, a common and distressing symptom, has been plaguing humans. Various pharmacological and nonpharmacological treatments have been widely studied to achieve the desired effect for hair regeneration.
Now, it is easy to cure baldness because of a noninvasive, low-cost hair-growth-stimulating technology.
The Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a universal motion-activated and wearable electric stimulation device that can effectively promote hair regeneration via random body motions.
How it works:
Small devices called nanogenerators passively gather energy from day-to-day movements and then transmit low-frequency pulses of electricity to the skin. That gentle electric stimulation causes dormant follicles to “wake up.”
The electric pulses are incredibly gentle and don’t penetrate any deeper than the very outermost layers of the scalp. Thus, the device doesn’t cause any harm or side effects.
Engineers experimented on hairless mice and found that the technology stimulated hair growth just as effectively as two different compounds found in baldness medicines.
Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UW-Madison, said, “It’s a self-activated system, very simple and easy to use. The energy is very low; thus, it will cause minimal side effects.”
Wang and colleagues published a description of the technology in the journal ACS Nano.