Sweat contains a lot of information about your health
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Wow, that’s pretty salty,” said Stefan van der Vluyt, looking at my numbers. I could have told him that. I just did a sweaty 45 minute workout on a stationary bike and salt is already starting to crystallize on my t-shirt. But van der Vroot knows exactly what it means to be salty. I sweated out 347 milligrams of sodium in 370 milliliters of water. It has a high salt concentration, so you will need to replenish it.
Van der Fluit is the co-founder of a London-based company called Flowbio that specializes in sweat analysis for athletes. During training, I wore a sensor called S1 on my upper arm. The sensor collects sweat into small channels, automatically measures its volume and sodium concentration, and sends the data to an app on your smartphone. Using that data, the app calculates my total loss.
If I were an endurance athlete, that data would be invaluable and could probably be the difference between winning and losing. I don’t, but Van der Vluyt does. A competitive cyclist, he had problems with dehydration for many years. However, after I started using the sweat sensor, it disappeared and my performance improved.
Flowbio’s S1 is one of the few wearable sweat sensors to hit the market in the last few years. These are primarily aimed at people who sweat during work, such as athletes and manual workers, but they can also be used by people who:
Source: www.newscientist.com
