Get a Grip on Your Health: Revolutionary Finger Wrap Offers Instant Check-Ups
Revolutionary Electronic Finger Wrap for Simple Health Checkups
Measuring Blood Concentrations of Various Biomarkers in Sweat Using Sweat as an Energy Source
An electronic finger wrap that can be easily attached like a Band-Aid has been developed to enable simple health checkups. This wrap does not require a separate power source because it uses the sweat from the fingertips as an energy source. This is what the health and medical webzine ‘Health Day’ reported on the 4th (local time) based on a paper by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) published in ’Nature Electronics’.
“This is automated health screening at your fingertips,” said lead author Shi Chao Ding, a UCSD postdoctoral researcher in electrical engineering. The electronic device analyzes sweat from your fingertips to measure blood levels of glucose, vitamins, medications, and other biomarkers.
The fingertips are the most sweaty part of the body, the researchers noted. Each fingertip has more than a thousand sweat glands, which can produce 100 to 1,000 times more sweat than other parts of the body. To use this sweat as a means of tracking human health, the researchers created a wrap that can fit a human finger by attaching various electronic components to a thin, flexible, stretchable polymer.
This electronic wrap draws power from the sweat of your fingertips. The wrap contains a biofuel cell that converts chemicals found in sweat into electricity. The electricity generated by the fuel cell is stored in a pair of flexible silver chloride batteries.
The battery powers four sensors that track specific biomarkers, such as blood sugar, vitamin C, or levodopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease. A small chip embedded in the lab processes the signals from the sensors and transmits the data via Bluetooth to a smartphone or laptop app. So “the wearer can harvest energy and track biomarker levels even when they’re resting or sleeping.”
The researchers showed that by having subjects wear the device all day, they could track changes in four biomarkers: blood sugar levels during a meal, lactate levels during exercise, vitamin C levels while drinking orange juice, and levodopa levels after eating fava beans, a natural source of levodopa.
The researchers say that by replacing the sensor, other types of biomarker analysis are possible. The finger wrap could also be linked to other devices to help people stay healthy. For example, it could alert an insulin pump to changes in blood sugar levels in a diabetic patient, helping them regulate their insulin. “The ultimate goal is to have autonomous, sensing, and therapeutic capabilities all in one device,” Ding said.