Project Description:

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a very common gastrointestinal disorder affecting about 50 million people in the U.S. each year. The most common symptom of IBS is abdominal pain. Current treatment options are limited and insufficient. For example, dietary modifications require significant disruptions to the patient’s lifestyle, and medications fail to completely relieve the abdominal pain for all patients and often come with adverse effects. Therefore, instead of focusing on symptom management, our team, the Gut Gurus, are targeting the root of the problem with neuromodulation. IBS abdominal pain is a result of the dysregulation of the neural pathway that connects our brain and intestines, called the Gut-Brain axis. The key player in this Gut Brain axis is the vagus nerve, which is a very long nerve running from your brain down to your large intestine, with small branches that run into the ear. Our device, SleepStim, is a neurostimulation device that targets this Gut-Brain axis by sending electrical signals to the vagus nerve through the ear, and thus relieving abdominal pain. SleepStim is a small, lightweight, and non-invasive device that is so easy to use you can do it in your sleep…literally! Place SleepStim onto your ear before bed, sleep through the night as electrical signals are administered to stimulate your vagus nerve, wake up in the morning, remove it from your ear, and go on to have a pain-free day!