Recent Progress in Wearable Biosensors: From Healthcare Monitoring to Sports Analytics

Abstract

Recent advances in lab-on-a-chip technology establish solid foundations for wearable biosensors. These newly emerging wearable biosensors are capable of non-invasive, continuous monitoring by miniaturization of electronics and integration with microfluidics. The advent of flexible electronics, biochemical sensors, soft microfluidics, and pain-free microneedles have created new generations of wearable biosensors that explore brand-new avenues to interface with the human epidermis for monitoring physiological status. However, these devices are relatively underexplored for sports monitoring and analytics, which may be largely facilitated by the recent emergence of wearable biosensors characterized by real-time, non-invasive, and non-irritating sensing capacities. Here, we present a systematic review of wearable biosensing technologies with a focus on materials and fabrication strategies, sampling modalities, sensing modalities, as well as key analytes and wearable biosensing platforms for healthcare and sports monitoring with an emphasis on sweat and interstitial fluid biosensing. This review concludes with a summary of unresolved challenges and opportunities for future researchers interested in these technologies. With an in-depth understanding of the state-of-the-art wearable biosensing technologies, wearable biosensors for sports analytics would have a significant impact on the rapidly growing field—microfluidics for biosensing.

Wearable Sensors in Sports for Persons with Disability: A Systematic Review

“…It is worth noting that none of the analyzed papers adopted flexible, skin-interfaced wearable devices to monitor the physiological and biochemical status of the athlete with disability. Even though these sensors are predominantly adopted in healthcare monitoring, recent advances in this technology also offer the opportunity to continuously observe the changes in athletic parameters which are relevant to sports performance analysis or injury prevention [ 75 , 76 ]. Flexible wearable sensors could represent a true added value to continuously monitor health status together with the quality/quantity of physical exercise, which is of great importance for athletes with disability.…”

Continuous Ketone Monitoring: A New Paradigm for Physiologic Monitoring

“…As is the case with most new microdevice technologies, increasing miniaturization is the norm and therefore it is reasonable to consider a future that includes combined CGM/CKM devices. 37 Another issue will be to determine which patients with diabetes would most benefit from wearing a CKM all the time. Patients with frequent hospitalization for DKA would potentially benefit from wearing a CKM.…”

Biomedical Applications of Electromagnetic Detection: A Brief Review

“…The strength of this signal depends on the position of the hydrogen nucleus in the molecular structure and the surrounding environment, so it can reflect a large amount of media information. In the late 1980s, the phased array coil concept was introduced into the field of magnetic resonance imaging, which revolutionized the reception of MR signals [114]. The receiving array can use multiple small surface RF coils to obtain a higher signal-to-noise ratio image in a wider range by appropriately combining the signals from a single element.…”