The hair-growth technology stimulates the skin with gentle, low-frequency electric pulses, which coax dormant follicles to reactivate hair production.

Reversing baldness could someday be as easy as wearing a hat, thanks to a noninvasive, low-cost hair-growth-stimulating technology developed by engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UW–Madison. and colleagues published a description of the technology in ACS Nano.

Based on devices that gather energy from a body’s day-to-day motion, the hair-growth technology stimulates the skin with gentle, low-frequency electric pulses, which coax dormant follicles to reactivate hair production.

The devices reactivate hair-producing structures that have gone dormant. That means they could be used as an intervention for people in the early stages of pattern baldness. Because the devices are powered by the movement of the wearer, they don’t require a bulky battery pack or complicated electronics. In fact, they’re so low-profile that they could be discreetly worn underneath an everyday baseball cap.

Wang has pioneered electric bandages that stimulate wound-healing and a weight-loss implant that uses gentle electricity to trick the stomach into feeling full.

The hair-growth technology is based on a similar premise: 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.”

“Electric stimulations can help many different body functions,” says Wang in a news release. “But before our work there was no really good solution for low-profile devices that provide gentle but effective stimulations.”

Because the electric pulses are incredibly gentle and don’t penetrate any deeper than the very outermost layers of the scalp, the devices don’t seem to cause any unpleasant side effects. That’s a marked advantage over other baldness treatments, like the medicine Propecia, which may carry risk of sexual dysfunction, depression and anxiety.

What’s more, in side-by-side tests on hairless mice, the devices stimulated hair growth just as effectively as two different compounds found in baldness medicines.

“It’s a self-activated system, very simple and easy to use,” says Wang. “The energy is very low so it will cause minimal side effects.”

The researchers have patented the concept with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and they hope to move forward with human testing soon.