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For those who hate needle sticks, a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are designing portable skin sensors that can detect what's present in sweat.
They predict that, in the near future, sweat monitoring could avoid the use of more invasive procedures such as blood tests, and provide real-time updates on health problems such as fatigue or fatigue. dehydration.
In an article published recently in Progress of science, researchers explain new sensor design that can be quickly fabricated using a "roll-to-roll" method of processing that prints sensors on a sheet of plastic similar to a word in a newspaper .
They used sensors to track sweat rate, metabolites and electrolytes in sweat from volunteers doing exercise and others who were chemically induced sweating. .
The goal of the project is not just to make the sensors, but to start doing many studies on the subject and see what sweat tells us – I always say "decode" the composition of sweat. For this, we need reliable, reproducible sensors that we can scale to fit multiple sensors at different locations on the body and apply them to many different subjects..
Ali Javey, Senior Paper Writer and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UC Berkeley
Javey is also a science professor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The new sensors feature a microscopic spiral tube (or microfluidic) that absorbs perspiration from the skin. By monitoring the rate at which sweat passes through microfluidics, sensors can reveal a person's sweat or perspiration rate.
The microfluidic is also equipped with chemical sensors capable of detecting electrolyte concentrations such as sodium and potassium and metabolites such as glucose.
Javey and his team collaborated with scientists at the VTT Technical Research Center in Finland to create a way to quickly make sensor patches in a similar roller-like process.
"Roll-to-roll processing enables the production of large volumes of low-cost disposable patchesSaid Jussi Hiltunen of ATV. "Academic groups gain a significant advantage from roll-to-roll technology when the number of test devices does not limit the search. In addition, large-scale manufacturing demonstrates the potential application of the sweat detection concept in practical applications.. "
To better understand what sweat can reveal about the real-time health of the human body, the team first placed the sweat sensors at various locations in the volunteers' body, including the armpits, the lumbar spine. forearm, forehead and upper back, and then measured the rate of sweating. and the levels of potassium and sodium in their sweat while they were riding an apartment bike.
They learned that the local sweat rate could specify the total loss of body fluid during exercise, which means that monitoring sweat rate could be a way to give athletes an alert when they exercise. too much.
Traditionally, people collected sweat from the body for a while, then analyzed it. So you can not really see the dynamic changes very well with good resolution. Using these wearable devices, we can now continuously collect data from different parts of the body, for example, to understand how local sweat loss can estimate fluid loss throughout the body.
Hnin Yin Yin Nyein, lead author of the study and graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering, UC Berkeley
They also used the sensors to compare blood glucose and sweat levels in healthy and diabetic patients, discovering that a simple measurement of sweat glucose does not determine a person's blood glucose level.
There was much hope that noninvasive sweat tests could replace blood-based measurements for the diagnosis and monitoring of diabetes, but we showed that there was no correlation simple and universal between sweat and blood sugar levels. This is important for the knowledge community, so that in the future we can focus on finding individualized or multi-parameter correlations.
Mallika Bariya, Senior Author and Graduate Student in Materials Science and Engineering, UC Berkeley
Contributors to the article include Liisa Kivimaki, Sanna Uusitalo, Elina Jansson, Tuomas Happonen and Christina Liedert of the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland; and Tiffany Sun Liaw, Christine Heera Ahn, John A. Hangasky, Jianqi Zhao, Lin Yuanjing, Minghan Chao, Yingbo Zhao and Li-Chia Tai from UC Berkeley.
The NSF Nanofabrication Systems for Mobile Computing and Mobile Energy Technologies (NASCENT), the Berkeley Sensors and Actuators Center (BSAC) and the Bakar Fellowship have supported this search.
Ali Javey describes an earlier version of his laboratory's portable sweat sensor in this 2016 video. (Video Credit: UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)
Source: https://www.berkeley.edu
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