If you want an accurate analysis of your health, get ready to sweat.
If you felt like that just monitoring your heart rate or number of steps taken is not enough, a new wearable device will check your health by analyzing your sweat. Unfortunately, this device is still in its prototype stages of development, being created at the University of California, Berkely.
The main idea behind this device’s creation was to effectively attach a small pathology lab to each individual in order to check on a person’s biochemical levels which in turn point out to the onset of various illnesses or phenomena. Even if the device is long ways off until it can reach full viability in order for it to be commercialized, the first steps towards achieving that goal have already been taken.
At this point, the wearable band is flexible enough to be worn on your wrist, it can easily connect through Bluetooth to your smartphone and can accurately check on four distinct biomarkers. These chemical compounds are two electrolytes, sodium and potassium, and two metabolites, glucose and lactates.
In terms of sodium levels, can effectively signal an onset of dehydration or the threat of muscle cramps. By displaying a message to the user, it can advise you to drink an electrolyte-boosting drink or just take a small rest. Glucose levels in sweat are directly linked to the levels within the whole subject’s system, Regarding high levels of lactates, they can hint at low levels of blood pressure in specific parts of the body, depending on where the device is worn.
These four markers are just the start, with the research team focusing on the development of accurate protein and molecules in order to portray a more conclusive assessment of one’s health. Even if sweat has been partially ignored up to this point, with doctors focusing more on blood, urine, and saliva samples in order to discern a subject’s general well-being at a specific moment in time, it can effectively hint at various disease and illness onsets.
Even if at first, this device might seem to require large amounts of sweat in order to function properly, this is entirely not the case. The wearable can display an accurate analysis by just using one tenth of a sweat droplet. The developers of the device hope to reduce this amount even more in the future in order to dismiss the need of the wearer to undergo thorough exercise so that the device will function to its full extent.
Bearing in mind that the concept that a new wearable device will check your health by analyzing your sweat, major companies might approach this idea rather seriously if the prototype stage of the device proves to be extensively viable. The new age of wearable devices might be just around the corner.
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