Wearable tech: Sweat helps ultra-thin adhesive film detect what is going on inside your body

According to a new study, a thin adhesive film can now tell you about your health condition by reading chemical indicators in sweat. Read on to know more.

By: Jahnavi Sarma | | Published: June 19, 2020 10:56 pm

While the team designed a custom smartwatch and app to work with the system, they say the concept could someday be applied to popular models of smartwatches. @Shutterstock

It has been quite some time since wearable technology has been used to monitor health. Now researchers have developed a thin adhesive film that could upgrade a consumer smartwatch into a powerful health-monitoring system. The system looks for chemical indicators found in sweat to give a real-time snapshot of what’s happening inside the body. According to the study from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), published in the journal of Science Advances, the researchers engineered a disposable, double-sided film that attaches to the underside of a smartwatch. Also Read - Health Tech: Coronary stent and 5 other most implanted medical devices

The film can detect molecules such as metabolites and certain nutrients that are present in body sweat in very tiny amounts. They also built a custom smartwatch and an accompanying app to record data. Also Read - Health Tech: Gadgets that have made life easier for people with diabetes

The inspiration for this work came from recognizing that there are already more than 100 million smartwatches and other wearable tech sold worldwide that have powerful data collection, computation and transmission capabilities. Now on the basis of this new study, researchers have come up with a solution to upgrade these wearables into health-monitoring platforms, enabling them to measure molecular-level information so that they give us a much deeper understanding of what’s happening inside our body in real time. Also Read - Heath Tech: 4 innovative technologies that will change cancer treatment

New tech effective in various scenarios

According to the researchers, the skin-touching side of the adhesive film collects and analyses the chemical makeup of droplets of sweat. The watch-facing side turns those chemical signals into electrical ones that can be read, processed and then displayed on the smartwatch. The study revealed that the researchers tested the film on someone who was sedentary, someone doing office work and people engaged in vigorous activity, such as boxing, and found the system was effective in a wide variety of scenarios. They also noted that the stickiness of the film was sufficient for it to stay on the skin and on the watch without the need for a wrist strap for an entire day.

Researchers hopeful that this tech can be applied to popular models of smartwatches

This latest study shows a new way that such technologies could be widely adopted. Researchers are particularly excited about this technology because by transforming smartwatches and wearable tech into biomonitoring platforms, it becomes possible to capture multidimensional, longitudinal and physiologically relevant datasets at an unprecedented scale, basically across hundreds of millions of people. This thin sensing film that works with a watch shows such a path forward. While the team designed a custom smartwatch and app to work with the system, the research team said the concept could someday be applied to popular models of smartwatches.

(With inputs from IANS)

Published : June 19, 2020 10:56 pm

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