Sweat Patches

Sweat – it helps to stop the body overheating, it creates unsightly underarm stains on clothing, and it stings when it trickles into a person’s eyes. It also contains a wealth of valuable health and fitness information that scientists are just now beginning to tap into. The stick-on monitor on the unusually sweaty forearm pictured, for example, can detect both the rate and volume that a person perspires as well as the sweat’s acidity (an indicator of hydration state), and its concentration of lactate, glucose and chloride ions, which can detect exercise intolerance, hypoglycemia, and electrolyte imbalance among other things. Each of these parameters is detected via colour changes of specific parts of the patch –the dots and squiggly lines. Thus assessing a person’s sweat is as simple as photographing the patch with a smart phone and analysing the data with image processing software. Never has perspiration been so informative.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

Writer

Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

Website

• Image courtesy of John A. Rogers, Northwestern University
• Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Science Translational Medicine, November 2016