As many as one in five Americans suffers from chronic stomach troubles. Ranging from daily upset stomach to heartburn, debilitating vomiting and severe nausea, gastric disorders are common and often difficult to diagnose and treat. For thousands of years, Eastern medicine has treated stomach troubles by stimulating a small spot just below the bend in the wrist.

Chen, a professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, is working with researchers, physicians and engineers on a device that’s worn like a wristwatch and delivers a faint electrical impulse every five seconds or so to the underside of the wearer's wrist—long known by acupuncturists as the pulse point that regulates stomach function. A kind of pacemaker for the stomach, the wrist device gently jump-starts the stomach’s "slow waves" back into a healthy rhythm.

Different than strong, post-meal stomach contractions, slow waves happen about three times per minute in a healthy empty stomach. When those waves fall out of rhythm, the stomach becomes prone to any number of troubles.

Before his slow-wave regulator, Chen pioneered a device similar to an electrocardiograph that measures stomach waves through electrodes placed strategically on the patient’s skin. That device, the electrogastrograph (EGG), has become part of the Johns Hopkins Motility Center's arsenal of diagnostic tests, helping physicians solve patients’ medical mysteries like gastroparesis and functional dyspepsia.

Though Western medicine has known about the gut’s electrical system for almost a century, without an invasive sensor placed deep inside a patient's digestive system, physicians couldn't detect the faint electrical waves. Chen’s EGG measurement tool, which produces images depicting the highs and lows of slow-wave activity, offers physicians important diagnostic data.

Chen has gotten interest and funding from the National Institutes of Health for his wrist-worn electrical stimulator. It is set for clinical trials at Johns Hopkins in early 2015.