Measuring Your Sweat, A Health Monitor And Diagnostic Device Is The Future Of Wearable Technology

Scientists are creating a wearable gadget that stimulates and collects sweat via a patch the size of a band-aid, and then analyzes it using your smartphone.

Sweat, the cooling system of your body, is made almost completely of water, with tiny amounts of other chemicals, including ammonia, urea, salts, and sugar. Remarkably, these chemicals along with the small molecules and peptides they contain can reveal what is going on inside your body. For this reason, scientists are trying to harness sweat through some form of wearable technology and turn it into a new way to measure and monitor your immediate health. “Sweat contains a trove of medical information and can provide it in almost real time,” wrote Dr. Jason Heikenfeld, associate professor of electronic and computing fsystems, University of Cincinnati, in an article for IEEE Spectrum.

Since, well, nearly forever doctors have been extracting fluids from our bodies in order to evaluate some aspect of our health. How many blood tests, urine tests, or saliva tests have you undergone in your life? For some time now, researchers have been exploring ideas and technologies that might continuously monitor a given biomarker and so open a window on the status of our overall health, in the manner, say, of a diabetic who daily tests her blood sugar levels. Because of its non-invasive (and therefore painless) possibilities, Heikenfeld and his co-researchers began to focus their efforts on using sweat as fuel.

Specifically, Heikenfeld envisions a wearable gadget that stimulates and collects sweat via a patch about the size of a band-aid, and then analyzes it using your smartphone. “Sweat is a vastly untapped biofluid for human performance monitoring,” said Heikenfeld’s collaborator, Dr. Joshua Hagen of the Air Force Research Laboratory, which funds the research.