Love wearing your “fitbits” and “apple watch” to track your activity through out the day. Exciting news at hand!! Researchers at the University of Illiniois ( Kohet al. [1]) take this popular technology to the next level where this “microfluidic” (a technology that manipulates and controls fluids in super small volumes, these voulmes are referred to as microlitres, which is 1/1000 times of a ml (millilitre) and sometimes even smaller volumes), device remains in contact with your skin and collects and analyses your sweat.
The “readout” or the indicator is integrated with your smartphone which captures and image to display the change in color as ingredients in your sweat interact with the sensors in the device. Some of the parameters detected are pH, lactate, glucose concentrations, and chloride ion concentrations in sweat. The results were similar to the available tests in the laboratory the authors report.
“Analysis of sweat is nevertheless of great interest for monitoring of physiologic health status (for example, hydration state) and for the diagnosis of disease (for example, cystic fibrosis)”.. The authors explain. [1]
Such devices can also used to harvest other body fluids such as saliva, tears and secretions from a wound to be analysed. This opens up the possibility for improvement of such devices.
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