New Wearable Tracks Your Health Through Corisol In Your Sweat

Today's wearables usually depend on your pulse and heart rate to badess your fitness and health. A team of Stanford scientists is looking more closely at another metric: sweat.

Researchers at the California institution have created a versatile garment that detects cortisol levels in your sweat. Cortisol, a stress hormone, is often an accurate indicator of athletic performance and potential illness because it effectively communicates the activity of your adrenal and pituitary glands. Measuring cortisol levels traditionally requires several days of laboratory testing – but this new device reduces the waiting time to a fraction of it.

While sensors generally detect a positive or negative charge, cortisol is particularly difficult to follow. neutral – that is, no charge. But materials specialist Alberto Salleo has created an elegant solution: an expandable sensor around a membrane that will only attach to cortisol. When this sensor is worn on the skin as a patch, it carries sweat through the small holes in the bottom. The charged particles like sodium and potbadium (also present in perspiration) will cross the membrane in a transparent way. They will be blocked, however, if the cortisol is in the way. As such, the sensor can still detect these charged ions, but only if cortisol is also present.

"We are particularly interested in the detection of sweat because it provides non-invasive and continuous monitoring of various biomarkers." Onur Parlak, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salleo laboratory and lead author of the article, explains the findings of the team. "This offers a new approach for the early detection of various diseases and the badessment of sports performance."

In the current state, a user only needs to sweat enough to flicker so the patch works. From there, measuring cortisol levels is just a matter of seconds. Of course, the technology has not been perfected yet. Currently, if you sweat too much, the sensor is not as effective, which goes against its purpose. Researchers also want to improve the overall reliability of the data, and examine a saliva sensor, so you do not need to sweat every time you want to track your cortisol levels.

In the end, the team hopes to create a device that can track multiple biomarkers simultaneously, giving people a clearer and more unique idea of ​​what's going on in their bodies.