Wearable sensors to detect and monitor what is in your sweat

Engineers from the University of California, Berkeley developed wearable skin sensors that can detect what is in our sweat. Sweat provides us with a wealth of information about our body condition. It consists of a wide spectrum of different chemicals. So, to get the information that is accurate, useful about the body, health, and mental conditions by analyzing sweat, they have developed an array of sensors which can detect and analyze multiple different chemicals simultaneously in real-time. At the same time, they have developed the computation that goes along with it. The goal of this project is to develop a wearable technology that we could use to get some accurate and meaningful information about or physiological state.

It has a flexible printed electronic component which has the sensors to detect the different chemicals in sweat. There is a second component and that is where we can process the information, analyze the data and also transmit the signal to a wireless monitor, for example, a cell phone.

They decided to target, 4 different chemicals. They are sodium, potassium, glucose, and lactate. By looking at a concentration of some of the electrolytes like sodium and potassium, we can get the information about the dehydration. By looking at lactate, it can get information about muscle fatigue. So as the body's skin temperature changes, the output of the sensor changes. As a part of this electronic board, it has a processor chip, effectively a computer that can simultaneously correct for temperature change in the body.