Helicor’s StressEraser was honored at the Oscars of Medgadgets, the Frost & Sullivan Awards last week (attended by yours truly):

Frost & Sullivan’s 2006 Technology Innovation Award goes to Helicor, Inc. for developing the breakthrough “StressEraser” device technology. Intended for use by licensed psychological and psychiatric health care professionals, this handheld relaxation-training device is able to provide effective relief from chronic stress at the physiological, mental, and emotional level…

…StressEraser works by measuring the influence of the vagus nerve (the primary nerve of the parasympathetic nerves) on heart rate… The StressEraser uses a proprietary implementation of the Consecutive Heart Period (CHP) to measure vagal activity.

Several peer reviewed clinical studies indicate that CHP measurement (computed from the beat-to-beat heart rate) has a linear correlation with the level of vagal activity. Therefore, the StressEraser uses ‘wave by wave’ CHP measurement to observe the activity of the vagus nerve in real-time. Each time a person has an emotionally charged thought, there is a temporary inhibition of parasympathetic outflow.

In other words, every time a person has painful or emotional thought, there will be a temporary inhibition of the vagus nerve. This causes the real-time CHP measure to drop to near zero. By monitoring real-time CHP, the StressEraser can detect when that happens and respond appropriately.

When we blogged about the high-concept, expertly designed StressEraser last October, we knew it had great potential. This award may be just the beginning — Helicor is pushing for clinical trials of the Stress Eraser in treating generalized anxiety disorder. No pressure.