How monitoring your sweat could reveal the state of your health

Sweat is seen on the back of Varapatsorn Radarong of Thailand during her Beach Volleyball Women's Gold Medal match at the 3rd Asian Beach Games in Haiyang, China in 2012 (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

Your sweat holds a lot of information about the state of your health

Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

“Wow, you’re quite salty,” says Stefan van der Fluit, looking over my numbers. I could have told him that. I have just done a sweaty, 45-minute workout on an exercise bike and the salt is already starting to crystallise on my T-shirt. But van der Fluit knows exactly how salty. I have just sweated out 347 milligrams of sodium in 370 millilitres of water. That’s on the high side, sodium-wise, and I need to replenish.

Van der Fluit is the co-founder of a company called Flowbio, based in London, which specialises in sweat analysis for athletes. During my workout, I was wearing a sensor called the S1 on my upper arm, which collects sweat in a tiny channel, automatically measures its volume and sodium concentration, and transmits the data to a smartphone app. Using that data, the app calculates my total losses.

If I were an endurance athlete, that data would be extremely valuable, perhaps the difference between winning and losing. I’m not, but van der Fluit is. As a competitive cyclist, he has had long-standing problems with dehydration. But since he started using the sweat sensor, they have gone away, and his performance has improved.

Flowbio’s S1 is one of a handful of wearable sweat sensors that have come onto the market in the past few years. They are mainly aimed at people who sweat a lot in the course of their jobs – athletes and manual workers – but they are also available to…

Check Also

H5N1 bird flu is closer to gaining pandemic potential than we thought

A highly infectious strain of bird flu has been circulating worldwide since 2020 ULISES RUIZ/AFP …