Self-powered smart patch for sweat conductivity monitoring

Inhalt:
The aging and the empowerment of the population to control their health the necessity of development smart systems, sensors and power sources to monitor their wellbeing has increased during the past years1. Lot of research is focused on monitoring the different biochemical compounds of the body in a non-invasive way but also, in a more intrusive way by analysing biological fluids. The use of biological fluids is the best approach to obtain the real information about the patient#s health. For the user's safety, two main solutions to manage and monitor biological fluids have raised; the so-called plug-and-play devices and the single-use devices. Plug-and-play devices are usually systems with two different parts, one with an important amount of electronic components, which used to be reusable and a non-reusable part, which should hold and analyse the biological sample and after the measurement is disposed5,6. This type of devices are usually expensive but reliable. In the other hand, single-use devices are less complex than the plug-and-play devices and so their sensitivity is worst but in contrast, are less expensive devices and can be operated by a non-experienced user. Within the whole types of biological samples, due to its accessibility, sweat seems to be the solution to have an insight perspective of the human body. As a first approach, in this work we have developed a self-powered smart patch for sweat conductivity monitoring, focused in the screening Cystic Fibrosis. The self-powered patch is able to measure the conductivity of a liquid sample by a new method avoiding the use of alternating current (AC), the gold standard technique used nowadays to measure the conductivity of a liquid.