Publications

Real-time monitoring of hydration biomarkers in tandem with biophysical markers can offer valuable physiological insights about heat stress and related thermoregulatory response. These metrics have been challenging to achieve with wearable sensors.

Wearable sensors are a recent paradigm in healthcare, enabling continuous, decentralized, and non- or minimally invasive monitoring of health and disease. Continuous measurements yield information-rich time series of physiological data that are holistic and clinically meaningful.

The makeup of our sweat has the potential to be used to noninvasively monitor health during exercise. Here, Cho et al. develop a wearable microfluidic band to measure local sweat biochemistry of muscles in human participants during rest or cycling exercise.

Ketones, such as beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), are important metabolites that can be used to monitor for conditions such as diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) and ketosis. Compared to conventional approaches that rely on samples of urine or blood evaluated using laboratory techniques, processes for monitoring of ketones in sweat using on-body sensors offer significant advantages.

Wearable sweat sensors could be used to monitor patients with heart failure, providing a route to personalized and automated patient management in hospitals and at home.

Exposure to extreme heat during physical exertion may impair cognitive and physical abilities commonly known as heat stress. Industrial workers are vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat due to increasing ambient temperatures, tasks with radiant heat exposures,

Wearable technology is revolutionizing workplace safety with real-time, personalized insights mitigating the increasing risks of heat stress.

Protecting the workforce is imperative to improving the overall effectiveness and productivity of offshore operations. Minimizing workplace injury is an important aspect of wearable technology, and this kind of personal protective equipment (PPE) continues to advance and evolve as new challenges arise.

Wireless, skin-interfaced electronic and microfluidic devices have the potential to replace wired, bulky, and cumbersome technologies for personal and clinical health monitoring, allowing care to extend from hospital settings to the home.

Increasing industry awareness of heat safety, advocating for regulatory improvements, and implementing next-generation wearable devices, researchers, clinicians, and industry leaders can develop advanced heat safety strategies.

Skin-interfaced microfluidic systems help assess health status and chemical exposure. Eccrine sweat glands in the skin are key components of an ingenious system for evaporative cooling. Their action is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system in an adaptive, closed-loop manner to help maintain thermal homeostasis during physical or mental exertion or exposure to high temperatures.

The Gx Sweat Patch is a wearable microfluidic sweat sensor that can be worn by athletes to monitor their sweating rate and sweat chloride concentration. Here, we highlight the commercialization of the Gx Sweat Patch, from developing and optimizing prototypes of a wearable sweat-sensing platform, to validation in competitive individual and team-sport athletes, and the […]

Advanced capabilities in noninvasive, in situ monitoring of parameters related to sweat serve as the basis for obtaining real-time insights into human physiological state, health, and performance. Although recently reported classes of soft, skin-interfaced microfluidic systems support powerful functions in this context, most are designed as single-use disposables.

Dehydration has many deleterious effects on cognitive and physical performance as well as physiological function, in the context of sports, industrial work, clinical rehabilitation, and military applications.

Nutrients play critical roles in maintaining core physiological functions and in preventing diseases. Technologies for delivering these nutrients and for monitoring their concentrations can help to ensure proper nutritional balance.

Skin-interfaced wearable systems with integrated colorimetric assays, microfluidic channels, and electrochemical sensors offer powerful capabilities for noninvasive, real-time sweat analysis. This Perspective details recent progress in the development and translation of novel wearable sensors for personalized assessment of sweat dynamics and biomarkers, with precise sampling and real-time analysis.

Cystic fibrosis is diagnosed in infants by use of sweat testing as elevated chloride concentrations in sweat are indicative of cystic fibrosis. The current approach can have poor sensitivity and require repeated testing.

Advanced capabilities in noninvasive, in situ monitoring of sweating rate and sweat electrolyte losses could enable real-time personalized fluid-electrolyte intake recommendations.

Skin-interfaced, wireless devices for clinical-grade monitoring of physiological parameters are of growing interest for uses that range from healthcare to sports performance. This paper introduces a multifunctional skin-mounted microfluidic platform for capture and biomarker analysis of microliter volumes of sweat, a biofluid that can be collected noninvasively, with potential relevance in biophysical sensing.

mHealth technology could be utilized to predict exacerbations in COVID-19 patients experiencing mild symptoms and prioritize diagnostic testing in subjects who might have been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Recent advances in materials, mechanics and design have led to the development of ultrathin, lightweight electronic devices that can conformally interface with human skin. With few exceptions, these devices rely on electrical power to support sensing, wireless communication and signal conditioning.

Biomarkers in sweat provide insight about underlying physiological and metabolic processes and exhibit changes related to performance, wellness, and health

A nervous sweat may seem like an inconvenience, but your body could be releasing important signals. Herein, Gao and colleagues develop a wearable sensor with integrated microfluidics, immunoassays, and electronics for tracking cortisol in sweat—as a biomarker of stress.

The characterization of limb biomechanics has broad implications for analyzing and managing motion in aging, sports, and disease.

A wearable patch may soon be able to assess inflammatory biomarkers found in the sweat and interstitial fluid in individuals with atopic dermatitis to ultimately provide real-time information about their skin health.

Conventional diet assessment approaches such as the 24-hour self-reported recall are burdensome, suffer from recall bias, and are inaccurate in estimating energy intake.

Eccrine sweat is a rich and largely unexplored biofluid that contains a range of important biomarkers, from electrolytes, metabolites, micronutrients and hormones to exogenous agents, each of which can change in concentration with diet, stress level, hydration status and physiologic or metabolic state.

Gait and balance impairments are linked with reduced mobility and increased risk of falling. Wearable sensing technologies, such as inertial measurement units (IMUs), may augment clinical assessments by providing continuous, high-resolution data.

Comprehensive analysis of sweat chemistry provides noninvasive health monitoring capabilities that complement established biophysical measurements such as heart rate, blood oxygenation, and body temperature.

The rich range of biomarkers in sweat and the ability to collect sweat in a non-invasive manner create interest in the use of this biofluid for assessments of health and physiological status, with potential applications that range from sports and fitness to clinical medicine.

Connected wearable biosensors are a critical part of athletic performance analysis, injury and recovery time assessment, and hydration analytics, enabling elite athletes, trainers, and coaches to characterize the daily demands of sports.

Sweat is a largely unexplored biofluid that contains many important biomarkers ranging from electrolytes and metabolites to proteins, cytokines, antigens, and exogenous drugs.

Bio-integrated wearable systems can measure a broad range of biophysical, biochemical, and environmental signals to provide critical insights into overall health status and to quantify human performance.

Noninvasive, in situ biochemical monitoring of physiological status, via the use of sweat, could enable new forms of health care diagnostics and personalized hydration strategies.

Continuous, cuffless, and noninvasive blood pressure monitoring by measuring the pulse wave velocity is generally considered to be a promising technique for noninvasive measurements.

Sweat excretion is a dynamic physiological process that varies with body position, activity level, environmental factors, and health status. Conventional means for measuring the properties of sweat yield accurate results but their requirements for sampling and analytics do not allow for use in the field.

The rich composition of solutes and metabolites in sweat and its relative ease of collection upon excretion from skin pores make this class of biofluid an attractive candidate for point of care analysis.

Recent interdisciplinary advances in materials, mechanics, and microsystem designs for biocompatible electronics, soft microfluidics, and electrochemical biosensors establish the foundations for emerging classes of thin, skin-interfaced platforms capable of capturing, storing, and performing quantitative, spatiotemporal measurements of sweat chemistry, instantaneous local sweat rate, and total sweat loss.

This paper introduces super absorbent polymer valves and colorimetric sensing reagents as enabling components of soft, skin-mounted microfluidic devices designed to capture, store, and chemically analyze sweat released from eccrine glands.

During periods of activity, sweat glands produce pressures associated with osmotic effects to drive liquid to the surface of the skin. The magnitudes of these pressures may provide insights into physiological health, the intensity of physical exertion, psychological stress factors and/other information of interest, yet they are currently unknown due to absence of means for non-invasive measurement.

Wearable technology is a popular way many people monitor their general health and fitness, tracking heart rate, calories, and steps. Koh et al. now take wearable technology one step further.