For new wearable, monitoring health at the molecular level is no sweat

To get a detailed work up on your health, soon all you might have to do is work up a little sweat. A new wearable device that soaks in tiny volumes of perspiration from your brow or wrist can track multiple molecules leaking out of you in real-time, researchers report in Nature. The device could one day provide up-to-the-moment health reports, helping to spot conditions such as dehydration, chemical exposures, muscle fatigue, and chronic stress, and help manage diseases, such as diabetes, the authors suggest.

(credit: Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)

“Sweat is very rich in information about an individual’s health,” lead author of the study Ali Javey, of University of California, Berkeley, told Ars. “It has a lot of different chemicals in it, different proteins, different metabolites, electrolytes,” he said. And by monitoring the concentration of some of those chemicals in beads of sweat, researchers can glean useful health information.

(credit: Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)

For their first generation of sweat-scanning wearables, Javey and colleagues set up an array of off-the-shelf sensors that track sodium, potassium, glucose, lactate, and temperature. Monitoring electrolytes such as sodium and potassium may help track conditions like dehydration, Javey said. Lactate levels may be useful for tracking muscle fatigue, and glucose may help monitor blood sugar levels.

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