Wearable Sweat Sensors Could Track Your Health

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor   |   January 27, 2016 01:08pm ET

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Wearable sensors could analyze and measure skin temperature, and levels of metabolites and electrolytes in human sweat. Credit: Der-Hsien Lien and Hiroki Ota View full size image

Blood tests allow doctors to peer into the human body to analyze people's health. But in the future, there may be a less invasive way to obtain valuable information about a person's health: wearable sensors that use human sweat to look for signs of disease.
Sweat is a rich source of chemical data that could help doctors determine what is happening inside the human body, scientists explained in a new study. Perspiration is loaded with molecules, ranging from simple electrically charged ions to more complex proteins, and doctors can use sweat to diagnose certain diseases, uncover drug use and optimize athletic performance, they said.
"Sweat is pretty attractive to target for noninvasive wearable sensors, since it's, of course, very easy to analyze — you don't have to poke the body to get it — and it has a lot of information about one's health in it," said study senior author Ali Javey, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.