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Bioanalytical devices

Technological leap for sweat sensing

Nature volume 529, pages 475–476 (2016)Cite this article

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Sweat analysis is an ideal method for continuously tracking a person's physiological state, but developing devices for this is difficult. A wearable sweat monitor that measures several biomarkers is a breakthrough. See Letter p.509

Athletics trainers, physicians and even local pharmacists can take a sample of blood, saliva or urine and measure a whole panel of analytes (dissolved compounds) to reveal your physiological status at the time of sample collection. But none of the measurement techniques involved is conveniently portable or can continuously collect data for many hours or days — with the exception of glucose monitoring, which typically requires blood samples to be drawn by needle at regular intervals. On page 509 of this issue, Gao et al.1 report a truly non-invasive, continuous biomonitoring device: a wearable, Bluetooth-enabled band containing a panel of sensors for sodium, potassium, lactate, glucose and skin temperature. And rather than using the body fluids mentioned above, the device measures analytes in human sweat.

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Figure 1: Analysing sweat.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jason Heikenfeld is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing Systems, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, USA.,

    Jason Heikenfeld

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  1. Jason Heikenfeld
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Correspondence to Jason Heikenfeld.

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Competing interests

The author declares competing financial interests: J.H. is a co-founder of Eccrine Systems, Inc., a company that is commercializing sweat-sensing technologies and licensing intellectual property developed by him at the University of Cincinnati.

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Heikenfeld, J. Technological leap for sweat sensing. Nature 529, 475–476 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/529475a

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