WEARABLE SENSORS AND DEVICES FOR REAL TIME, HYDRATION AND SWEAT MONITORING

Arpitha M A, Keerthana M, R Sandhya, Chaitrashree R, Nagashree Hegde, Likith Gowda C

Being hydrated is one of the critical aspects for humans, including its role in the human body temperature regulation, mental function, and sports performance. Traditional hydration monitoring such as blood and urine tests and body weight measurement are considered to be accurate methods for measuring hydration level. However, those methods are considered to be invasive and impractical for continuous monitoring. This way, there was an urgent need to introduce non-invasive wearable devices able to provide hydration monitoring on-site and continuously.
According to recent studies, new wearable technology devices may provide information about physiological and biochemical parameters continuously. For instance, the sweat contains electrolytes such as sodium, potassium, which could be used as biomarkers for the estimation of hydration state. Advancements in electrochemical sensing, microfluidics, and flexible electronics allowed for the creation of compact and skin-friendly systems capable of collecting and analyzing an individual's sweat on-site.
Moreover, machine learning and prediction algorithms helped to obtain more accurate results. At the same time, there are a number of limitations to consider. They include problems associated with sensor calibration, intra- and inter-individual variations in sweat composition, noisy dataset, and the lack of validation in real-world settings. Moreover, most of the current devices work independently without incorporating sensors, prediction, and recommendation algorithms within one platform.

Keywords –Hydration monitoring, Wearable biosensors, Sweat analysis, Machine learning, Electrolyte detection.