Smart patch runs tests using sweat instead of blood

A new era is beginning where it’s possible to precisely assess the body’s health status using only sweat instead of blood tests. A KAIST research team has now developed a smart patch that can precisely observe internal changes through sweat when simply attached to the body. This is expected to greatly contribute to the advancement of chronic disease management and personalized health care technologies.

The team, led by Professor Ki-Hun Jeong of the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, has developed a wearable sensor that can simultaneously and in real-time analyze multiple metabolites in sweat. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Recently, research on wearable sensors that analyze metabolites in sweat to monitor the human body’s precise physiological state has been actively pursued. However, conventional “label-based” sensors, which require fluorescent tags or staining, and “label-free” methods have faced difficulties in effectively collecting and controlling sweat. Because of this, there have been limitations in precisely observing metabolite changes over time in actual human subjects.

To overcome these limitations, the research team developed a thin and flexible wearable sweat patch that can be directly attached to the skin. This patch incorporates both microchannels for collecting sweat and an ultrafine nanoplasmonic structure that analyzes sweat components using light. Thanks to this, multiple sweat metabolites can be simultaneously analyzed without the need for separate staining or labels, with just one patch application.

A nanoplasmonic structure is an optical sensor structure where nanoscale metallic patterns interact with light, designed to sensitively detect the presence or changes in concentration of molecules in sweat.

The patch was created by combining nanophotonics technology, which manipulates light at the nanometer scale (one-hundred-thousandth the thickness of a human hair) to read molecular properties, with microfluidics technology, which precisely controls sweat in channels thinner than a hair.

In other words, within a single sweat patch, microfluidic technology enables sweat to be collected sequentially over time, allowing for the measurement of changes in various metabolites without any labeling process. Inside the patch are six to 17 chambers (storage spaces), and sweat secreted during exercise flows along the microfluidic structures and fills each chamber in order.

The research team applied the patch to actual human subjects and succeeded in continuously tracking the changing components of sweat over time during exercise. Previously, only about two components could be checked simultaneously through a label-free approach, but in this study, they demonstrated for the first time that three metabolites—uric acid, lactic acid, and tyrosine—can be quantitatively analyzed simultaneously, as well as how they change depending on exercise and diet.

In particular, by using artificial intelligence analysis methods, they were able to accurately distinguish signals of desired substances even within the complex components of sweat.

Professor Ki-Hun Jeong said, “This research lays the foundation for precisely monitoring internal metabolic changes over time without blood sampling by combining nanophotonics and microfluidics technologies.

“In the future, it can be expanded to diverse fields such as chronic disease management, drug response tracking, environmental exposure monitoring, and the discovery of next-generation biomarkers for metabolic diseases.”