Wearables and Wellness
Athletes, military personnel,
and stroke patients try out state-of the-art wearables to boost performance,
improve readiness, and speed rehabilitation.
Northwestern bioelectronics pioneer John A. Rogers is collaborating with a widely diverse group of
partners—including Gatorade, the Seattle Mariners and other professional sports
teams, the US Air Force, and Shirley
Ryan AbilityLab—to bring his stretchable electronic devices
into widespread distribution.
His new microfluidic sweat analytics system
measures sweat and sweat biomarkers, allowing users to monitor sweat rate and
electrolyte loss. The information helps them keep hydrated, replenish their
electrolytes, and stay on top of their game.
Developed in Rogers’s
Northwestern Engineering lab, the
soft, flexible device sits on the skin and measures sweat to determine how the
body responds to exercise—displaying the results with a simple, real-time
visual readout. Launched by Rogers’s group through Northwestern’s Innovation and
New Ventures Office (INVO), startup Epicore Biosystems has
created large volume manufacturing capabilities for these microfluidic devices.
It plans to co-package them with nutritional, skin health, cosmetics, and
sports hydration products with future potential use in clinical medicine and
rehabilitation.
"The Gatorade Sports Science Institute
knows a great deal about sweat, and they have very rigorous testing protocols
for evaluating new technologies in this space,” says Rogers, the Louis Simpson
and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical
Engineering and Neurological Surgery in McCormick and Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine. Rogers is also the
director of the Center
for Bio-Integrated Electronics.
Lindsay Baker, principal scientist at the
Gatorade Sports Science Institute, comments, “Our mission has always been to
help athletes optimize their health and performance through research and
education in hydration and sports science. Through our partnership with Epicore
Biosystems, we’re developing exciting new ways to measure and monitor sweat,
which can help us better recommend hydration strategies for our athletes.”
On the
Fast Track
Initially introduced in 2016, Rogers’s
microfluidic design has come a long way in just a matter of months. Earlier designs
measured chloride loss, glucose, lactate, and pH levels in sweat. Newer platforms also quantify concentrations of heavy
metals such as lead and arsenic as well as urea and creatinine levels, the
latter of which relate to kidney health. The latest devices can also measure
these chemistries continuously, allowing wearers to monitor how their sweat
chemistry changes during an exercise regimen and throughout the day.
Even better: athletes do not need to pause
their workouts to decipher complicated information. Instead, they can monitor
these sequentially changing levels with a simple glance. During exercise, sweat
flows through the device’s microscopic channels and into different
compartments. In those compartments, reactions with chemical reagents result in
visible color changes that quantitatively relate to electrolyte concentrations.
“Most people want to know if they are losing
a lot of chloride, a little bit, or almost none,” Rogers says. “They can just
eyeball the device and determine if their electrolyte levels are high, medium,
or low.”
Another unique feature of these latest
platforms is the ability to measure users’ sweat during aquatic sports, even
when fully under water. New adhesive materials and microfluidic designs
maintain watertight seals to the skin. Northwestern’s swim team now uses the
system routinely during training and competition.
"We’ve been concerned about the impact
of sweating on hydration and performance,” says Jarod Schroeder, head coach of
Northwestern’s men’s swimming team, “but until now, we’ve had no way to make
quantitative measurements. The remarkably high levels of sweat loss that occur
in the pool demand careful scheduling for rehydration.”
Beyond
Athletics
Active duty airmen at the Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, also have begun using the devices. “The ability
to monitor sweat loss and sweat chemistry in situ on the skin is of interest
because the data may allow us to more effectively manage military readiness
under grueling conditions in training or on the battlefield,” says Jennifer
Martin, a research chemist for the US Air Force.
Patients also are using the devices at
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, one of the nation’s top translational research
hospitals. Researchers there are exploring left/right asymmetries in sweating
as a metric for recovery in stroke patients. The devices also help clinicians
monitor differences in patients’ sweat chemistry over the course of the
rehabilitation process.
"The unique capacity to measure sweating
across multiple body locations simultaneously opens up the possibility for
using anomalous sweating as an indicator of recovery status.” says Arun Jayaraman,
director of the Max Näder Lab for Rehabilitation Technologies and Outcomes
Research at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
Innovation
Continues
Rogers and his team continuously search for
new applications for wearable biometric technologies. Stroke patients are using
a new bandage-like throat sensor Rogers’s group developed to measure swallowing
ability and patterns of speech. The sensors aid in the diagnosis and treatment
of aphasia, a communication disorder associated with stroke, and stream data
wirelessly to clinicians’ phones and computers.
Because the sensors are wireless, patients
can wear them even after they leave the hospital, enabling doctors to monitor
how patients are functioning in the real world.
"Talking with friends and family at home
is completely different from what we do in therapy,” says Leora Cherney,
research scientist at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. “Having a detailed
understanding of patients’ communication habits outside of the clinic helps us
develop better strategies with our patients to improve their speaking skills
and speed up their recovery process.”
Amanda Morris and Kayla Stoner
https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/magazine/spring-2018/wearables-and-wellness.html?utm_source=alumni-newsletter-09-01-18&utm_campaign=alumni-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=email-magazine-footer-6
No comments:
Post a Comment