Human eccrine sweat is a rich composition of nearly 60 known biochemicals including metabolites, electrolytes, vitamins, amino acids, exogeneous drugs, and small proteins. Advances in sensing technologies, conformal electronics, and materials science lay the foundation for recent demonstrations of wearable sweat sensors. Unfortunately, majority of the devices rely either on active, battery-powered electronics for electrochemical detection or passive, colorimetric chemistries for visual readout. Complex construction and large size/weight represent disadvantages of the former; semi-quantitative operation and limited scope of measurable biomarkers are limitations of the latter. Additionally, present wearable sensors can detect only a handful of biomarkers present in the sweat. Quantification of the remaining chemicals still requires sweat collection using adsorbent pads followed by off-site chemical analysis. Such a route provides average concentration of sweat analytes and restricts the acquisition of their temporal concentrations. This prohibits understanding the relation between dynamic variations in sweat chemistry and human physiology. In this talk, we will describe an unusual collection of enabling materials, sensing technologies, advanced microfluidics, time-tracking schemes, and wireless electronics to address these issues. Specifically, we will describe our strategies that include soft microfluidics, fuel cells, colorimetrics and near field communication technologies that result in new classes of wireless, battery-free, skin-integrated devices for detailed analysis of human sweat.

Soft, skin-interfaced, wireless, battery-free, microfluidic devices for chronometric sweat capture and analysis

2019 Fall National Meeting

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