Is Sweat the Future of Health Monitoring?

Posted by & filed under Uncategorized.

safety-lane.com 07105
chiropractic-lane.com
www.cbd-lane
NEWARK
http://www.healthy-lane.com/

Is Sweat the Future of Health Monitoring?

Even as you read this, your body is working to maintain balance – and not just in the “don’t fall over” sense. Hordes of chemical reactions are happening inside you, producing energy, processing waste, and keeping you healthy. Along the way, your body is releasing signals about your well-being.

Wearable technology can reveal some of those signals, like heart rate or sleep cycles. Many more important clues about your health are evident in the blood. The problem: Most people don’t like to be stuck by a needle. (Just ask anyone with diabetes who’s had to prick their finger a dozen times a day.)

But there may be an alternative. Sweat stems from the water within our blood, which means sweat “is like a window into the blood,” says Sarah Everts, a science journalist and author of The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration.

Since sweat is easier to get to than blood, researchers are looking at whether it could be a pain-free way for us to gain better insight into our health.

In a world with more advanced sweat monitoring wearables, a person theoretically could:

  • Measure stress through cortisol production. A study showed that it is possible to detect cortisol through a wearable patch. But the work is very much in its early stages and hasn’t been used for any meaningful clinical assessment.

  • Let drinkers know it’s time to get a ride home. Research showed that flexible patches (ones that likely are far more comfortable than a SCRAM CAM) can detect ethanol in the bloodstream. So, imagine wearing a small patch that sends push notifications to your phone if you’ve had a few too many at happy hour.

  • Tell a coach that an athlete needs a break. Imagine an absorbent patch on the skin that collects information on lactate levels, then instantly sends results to the coach’s computer screen on the sideline, letting them know it is time for a player substitution.

  • Save people who have diabetes from so much finger pricking. Other early studies show that noninvasive, bandage-like wearable technologies could potentially measure glucose through sweat. Recently, Ohio State University researchers created a “smart necklace” that can monitor glucose levels of the person wearing it. The results suggest the sensor “will work to monitor other important chemicals in sweat,” according to a news release.

“The big future, and where we’re 100% active these days, is interstitial fluid sensing,” Heikenfeld says. “Most of the things you’d want to measure in blood, you’re able to do in interstitial fluid.”

He says his team is nearly ready to release a review that supports this claim.

Still, that doesn’t mean sweat won’t have a place, Heikenfeld says. He sees opportunities to use sweat for tracking hormone levels (such as those that regulate stress, sex, and sleep) and for monitoring levels of a medication in the body and tracking how quickly it’s broken down.

But for now, both interstitial fluid and sweat monitoring require much more research before any mass-market uses become available.

Sources:

Sarah Everts, science journalist; author of The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration.

John Rogers, PhD, professor, McCormick School of Engineering, Northwestern University.

Jason Heikenfeld, PhD, professor, University of Cincinnati.

ACS Sensors: “Wearable Cortisol Aptasensor for Simple and Rapid Real-Time Monitoring,” “Can Wearable Sweat Lactate Sensors Contribute to Sports Physiology?”

Temperature: “Physiology of sweat gland function: The roles of sweating and sweat composition in human health.”

Biosensors: “A Review on Flexible Electrochemical Biosensors to Monitor Alcohol in Sweat.”

Experimental Dermatology: “Eccrine sweat gland development and sweat secretion.”

Nature: “Fully integrated wearable sensor arrays for multiplexed in situ perspiration analysis.”

Journal of Environmental and Public Health: “Human excretion of bisphenol A: blood, urine, and sweat (BUS) study.”

Frontiers in Pediatrics: “Sweat Testing and Recent Advances.”

Nature Biomedical Engineering: “Sensitive sensing of biomarkers in interstitial fluid.”

Science Translational Medicine: “Soft, skin-interfaced sweat stickers for cystic fibrosis diagnosis and management.”

Biomicrofluidics: “The microfluidics of the eccrine sweat gland, including biomarker partitioning, transport, and biosensing implications.”

  • 1

via Blogger https://bit.ly/3BBS149