Forgot to drink water? Next-gen health monitoring devices may soon be able to remind you
Your future smartwatch may tell you when it's time to take a break and drink some water.
Image by Jacob Lund | Shutterstock
Your future smartwatch may tell you when it's time to take a break and drink some water.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have designed a wearable sweat sensor that can detect your hydration status during physical and mental activities.
A sweat sensor can measure changes in hydration status and help to understand when it’s time to drink water.
The researchers showed how the device measures electrodermal activity (EDA), which determines naturally occurring changes in the electrical properties of human skin during physical activity, to track hydration status.
Until now, EDA was primarily used to determine mental stress levels, but in the future, it could be used as an easier way to tell if a person is dehydrated.
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The sensor could be placed in already commonly used devices, such as a smartwatch, explained Ali Javey, the study's lead investigator, published in Nature Electronics.
That would be possible because the sensor is thin, breathable, and comfortable to wear, as Seung-Rok Kim, co-lead author of the study, shared.
Because of its physical properties, it can be added to a watch or a tracker, allowing users to monitor their stress levels and hydration status at all times.
Another co-lead author, Yifei Zhan, said that the sensor could be especially useful to professional athletes who spend a lot of time training and to people who work in the office or study to pay attention to their stress levels.
Researchers have doubted whether tracking EDA during physical activity could provide relevant outcomes because sweat emitted during workouts saturates the skin, making it harder for sensors to detect electrical changes.
To compensate for this, researchers at UC Berkeley used breathable and water-permeable electrodes that don’t let the sweat accumulate on the skin.
The study team tested three types of water-permeable electrodes. The results showed that skin conductance can show sweat rate and hydration level during different levels of physical and mental activities, reports UC Berkeley Engineering.
The researchers plan to test how various environmental conditions, such as temperature and humidity, affect the EDA signal.