New portable system developed to monitor health through sweat analysis

A new fully portable system has been developed to encapsulate and analyse biomarkers in a person's sweat as a means of monitoring their health.

Created by Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the miniature chip is designed to be placed directly on the skin or integrated into a bracelet, allowing it to determine sodium and potassium concentrations in sweat, or to measure their body temperature and pH.

It uses capillary action to pump miniscule amounts of sweat into the heart of the centre of the chip, which houses four silicon sensors measuring around 20 nanometres thick, making them extremely sensitive. Each sensor is coated with a different material to detect various biomarkers.

This design makes it a modular platform, as different biochemical layers can be incorporated on each of the miniature sensors to measure variables ranging from electrolytes and metabolites to tiny molecules and proteins. This data can then be sent directly to a smartphone.

Project leader Professor Adrian Ionescu said: "Even today's most advanced devices use sensors that are 10,000 times bigger than ours, and need a larger volume of sweat to be able to effectively analyse biomarkers."

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