Wearable sweat sensing for prolonged, semicontinuous, and nonobtrusive health monitoring

Abstract

Together with the upcoming market for wearable consumer technologies, noninvasive and continuous health monitoring has become a new trend in the healthcare landscape. In recent years, significant research has been targeted toward the development of wearable sensing devices for monitoring biomarker levels in nonobtrusively accessible biofluids such as tears, urine, saliva, and sweat. Sweat could be an ideal candidate for prolonged, semicontinuous, and nonobtrusive health monitoring because sweat is a continuously accessible biofluid containing physiologically and metabolically rich information. However, challenges still remain toward commercialized wearable sweat-sensing devices, and the correlation between biomarker concentrations in sweat with health conditions still seems to be not fully understood. This review article aims to display the full scope of sweat sensing for health monitoring, starting from the fundamentals of human sweat, via modeling of the sweat gland physiology toward wearable sweat-sensing devices in research and commercialization efforts. Finally, the challenges of sweat sensing that still have to be overcome toward the utilization of sweat sensing in the conventional healthcare settings are discussed.

Wearable Sweat Loss Measuring Devices: From the Role of Sweat Loss to Advanced Mechanisms and Designs

“…[ 42 , 43 ] Many related studies have investigated the mechanism of sweating. [ 31 , 42 , 44 , 45 ] Recently, sensible sweat has received increasing research attention in the field of wearable devices as it plays an important role in body core thermoregulation and maintenance of skin hydration. By contrast, although the other type of sweat, namely transepidermal water loss or insensible perspiration, has a similar physiological effect in the form of vapor, few studies have used wearable devices to quantify it.…”

“…However, the framework of many reports usually focused on reviewing sweat collection and analysis for tracking biomarkers rather than sweat loss measurements. [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ] In this article, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of the development of wearable SLMDs for monitoring sweat rate and volume. The paper highlights the importance and development of wearable SLMDs based on different mechanisms and designs.…”

Novel Clinimetric Toolset to Quantify the Stability of Blood Pressure and Its Application to Evaluate Cardiovascular Function After Spinal Cord Injury

“…The proposed method also has implications beyond blood pressure analysis. With the rapid development of wearable sensors (Zhang et al, 2019;Moonen et al, 2020) and point of care tests (Huang et al, 2019;Liu et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2020) as well as the advancements in neuromodulation and pharmaceutical interventions, the applications of modulating various biomarkers to fall into clinically accepted ranges are often desired. Therefore, the utilization of the methodology proposed in this study can be expanded into these other areas.…”

Nanomaterial‐Based Electrochemical Sensors: Mechanism, Preparation, and Application in Biomedicine

“…However, the sensitivity and selectivity of electrochemical sensors are limited for biomedical use, concerning the low abundance of targeted analytes and strong interference in biosamples. [ 3 ] To overcome the limitations, nanomaterials are introduced into the development of novel electrochemical biosensing techniques. [ 4 ]…”