(Invited) Passive Eccrine Sweat Analysis Technologies; A New Paradigm in Sweat Analytics

Wearable electronic monitors hold great promise in helping people to reach their health goals. These increasingly sophisticated devices help the wearers improve their wellness by constantly monitoring their activities and bodily responses. While consumer wearables that are non–sweat based have been useful for monitoring body vital parameters. However, solutions leveraging human sweat are still in the early stages of development. Wearable devices hold the potential to transform some industries most importantly the health care industry. Wearable sweat based diagnostic biosensors for the detection and monitoring of analytes in transdermal sweat present an intriguing pathway toward improving user health outcomes in an inexpensive and noninvasive manner. Transdermal biosensors have become a more viable option in recent years, due in large part to the miniaturization of conventional sensing mechanisms. Current minimally invasive strategies demonstrate encouraging results in the monitoring of select biomarkers in peripheral blood and interstitial fluid, but these devices are still minimally invasive as they puncture the skin. Current transdermal sweat biosensors require relatively large volumes in a localized region and count on chemically-induced sweating to attain sufficient sample volume. Thus, there exists a challenge in designing wearable sweat-based sensors that can report and quantify biomarkers of interest from low volumes of human sweat in a completely non-invasive yet still cost-effective manner. In this talk I will present some non-invasive sweat sensing technologies that detect and quantify biomarkers in human sweat.