Addressing our grand societal healthcare challenges, in both aspects of human suffering and the ever-growing cost of healthcare, necessitates a paradigm shift from generic and reactive medicine to personalized, proactive, and preventive medicine. Accordingly, wearable biomonitoring technologies play a critical role in promoting awareness and adoption of healthy lifestyles for disease prevention and enabling actionable feedback. Currently, commercialized wearable sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are only capable of tracking physical activities and vital signs, and fail to non-invasively access molecular-level biomarker information to provide insight into the body’s dynamic chemistry. At the current state, blood-based sensing techniques that provide direct measurements of circulating biomarkers cannot be scaled across the general population for daily monitoring of individuals (due to their invasive nature). Alternatively, other biofluids can be probed, which share biomarker partitioning pathways with blood and can be accessed non-invasively. In that regard, sweat is an attractive biofluid candidate, because it can be sampled on body and without the user intervention. Inherently, these non-invasive measurements are noisy due to the presence of confounders that affect the transport of biomarkers from blood, and subsequently their correlation. Here, we briefly review the significance of sweat-based monitoring and describe the recent advances in sweat sensing technologies, which aim to mitigate the effect of confounders to provide physiologically meaningful estimates of biomarker levels.

Wearable biomarker analysis for health and wellness monitoring at the point of person

2019 Fall National Meeting

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