Researchers from University of California (UCLA) have designed a disposable, double-sided and 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.
Adhesive Film Collects and Analyzes Chemical Makeup of Sweat Droplets
The adhesive film attaches to the underside of a smartwatch. The adhesive film can detect molecules such as metabolites and certain nutrients that are present in body sweat in very tiny amounts. The researchers also built a custom smartwatch and an accompanying app to record data.
“The inspiration for this work came from recognizing that we already have more than 100 million smartwatches and other wearable tech sold worldwide that have powerful data-collection, computation and transmission capabilities,” said study leader Sam Emaminejad, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “Now we 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,” added Emaminejad.
The skin-touching side of the adhesive film collects and analyzes 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.
New Custom Smartwatch and App to Work With the System
Sensors on a double-sided adhesive and vertically conductive film eliminates the need for the external connectors. The sensors on a double-sided adhesive have made it easier to integrate sensors with consumer electronics and eliminates the effect of a user’s motion that can interfere with the chemical data collection.
By incorporating enzymatic-sensing layers in the film, researchers have targeted glucose and lactate, which indicate body metabolism levels, and nutrients, such as choline. The research team have designed a custom smartwatch and app to work with the system, the researchers said the concept could someday be applied to popular models of smartwatches.
The researchers tested the film and found that the system was effective in a wide variety of scenarios. The researchers 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.
“We are particularly excited about our technology because by transforming our smartwatches and wearable tech into biomonitoring platforms, we could capture multidimensional, longitudinal and physiologically relevant datasets at an unprecedented scale, basically across hundreds of millions of people,” said Emaminejad.
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