Grabbing a massage as you walk around town has never been so easy.
A group of Cornell students recently invented an electric vest embedded with tiny motors intended to knead and massage the user's back and shoulders. The vest, which was created in hopes of relieving stress linked to negative health effects, was even designed to mimic human touch. “It’s like someone stroking you really lightly, like a mother soothing a kid who just woke up from a nightmare,” one of the vest's creators, senior Marina Gaeta, told the Cornell Chronicle.
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Stress causes the body to release a hormone known as cortisol, which can negatively impact a person's health if released for extended amounts of time. The effects can include increased heart pressure, decreased bone density, obesity, and impaired cognitive performance.
The trio from Cornell that invented the vest see it as a combatant to these health issues. “We find that in our modern way of life a lot of people have unnaturally and chronically elevated levels of cortisol,” said Gaeta. Multiple reports have found that stress can lead to a loss of productivity — at one point the World Health Organization estimated that job stress was costing American business as much as $300 billion annually in lost productivity, medical payments, and worker absences.
The new massage vest helped the team of students win one of two $10,000 Innovation Awards from Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The team filed a patent for their new invention last week, and they hope to use the prize money to improve the vest's flexibility and fit. Ultimately, they hope users will be able to wear it for its functionality, but also for it's style.
Said vest co-creator Eric Beaudette, “We’re marketing the vest as a piece of clothing that doesn’t look like a medical device and can just be worn anywhere."
Would you wear an electric massage vest? Tell us in the comments.
Image: Cornell