What Sweat Can Tell About Your Health

A new kind of wearable technology that can track your health based on the chemical composition of your sweat may be available soon. The new study suggests that sweat is teeming with information that can reveal the state of your health.

For decades, doctors have relied primarily on blood, urine, saliva and stool to get information from your body. However, this could all change with the invention of the wearable health-monitoring device. As Time reports, the device would be able to continuously measure what's in your sweat on a molecular level, translating this into valuable health information.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University developed and tested a sensor that can regularly monitor skin temperature and levels of sodium, potassium, glucose and lactate in your sweat. These biomarkers can indicate if you're dehydrated, fatigued, stressed or may have underlying physical ailments. The new device was described in a study published in Nature on Wednesday.

According to Ali Javey, lead author and professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkley, there are an unbelievable amount of chemicals found in sweat. "And every chemical is associated with different information about your health," he said.

According to L.A Times, researchers placed plastic electronic sensors that monitored the biomarkers of 14 participants both men and women. These sensors attach to a flexible circuit board that can be reused. The entire mechanism can be tucked into an athletic wristband or headband.

Although the mechanism only works when the user is perspiring, it doesn't need much perspiration for the sensors to work. In the experiment, the researchers found that sensors worked with a small amount of sweat. They were able to detect the varying levels of biomarkers in real time.

Javey explained that the sensors get accurate measurements from a fifth of a droplet of perspiration. Further improvements will be made, so minimum amount of sweat will be needed and the user doesn't need to exercise for the monitor to work.

According to Ron Davis, one of the authors and professor of biochemistry and genetics and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center, "It can measure a lot of things you can normally measure in blood but this gives you the opportunity to make many, many measurements over time," reports Time.

Although it this may not be the first wearable sweat monitor to enter the market, it is one of the first to measure a series of biomarkers at the same time. More work needs to be done before the monitor may be commercially available.

In the future, the researchers hope that they will be able to tell more from sweat. This device could also be useful in multiple medical applications like diagnosing heavy metal poisoning, warning a person with severe depression, or detecting infection in the body.

Check out the video below to see how the monitor works: