As you already know my aim is to have a device with built in sensors, which monitor your sweat on a daily basis. Which is automatically sent to your doctor / GP for real time health monitoring. With the aim to cut down on the congested doctors freeing up the waiting rooms and appointment for the people which really need them. The device was originally planned to be under the skin making it un-noticeable so fashion oriented people don’t get put off about having a patch on their arm, back or any part of the body although a new issue was pointed out me via the class tutor which is not many people in the modern day are going to want a device stuck inside them which traces specific things without you really knowing who is looking at it.
So for this reason I’ve researched into any other possible ways of which data can be taken from humans. This is where I reverted back to the on skin patch to collect data via sweat directly as your body pushes it out.
But the task was to come up with a plausible way to have a device which could become real in the upcoming future so I simple googled ‘Monitoring Sweat into google where I found a couple of interesting articles and medical reports regarding what can be found.
1:
HEADLINE: “Measuring Your Sweat, A Health Monitor And Diagnostic Device Is The Future Of Wearable Technology”
“Sweat, the cooling system of your body, is made almost completely of water, with tiny amounts of other chemicals, including ammonia, urea, salts, and sugar. Remarkably, these chemicals along with the small molecules and peptides they contain can reveal what is going on inside your body. For this reason, scientists are trying to harness sweat through some form of wearable technology and turn it into a new way to measure and monitor your immediate health. “Sweat contains a trove of medical information and can provide it in almost real time,” wrote Dr. Jason Heikenfeld, associate professor of electronic and computing systems, University of Cincinnati, in an article for IEEE Spectrum.”
This clearly shows work is currently being undertaken for this technology meaning there must be a market for it. The next part of this specific article I took most of my inspiration from is when the Air Force was mentioned to want this device to monitor the stress and alertness of the pilot.
“The Air Force is hoping the device will be able to accurately measure cytokine biomarkers, as a determination of a pilot’s stress level, and to measure neuropeptide biomarkers, such as Orexin-A, to understand alertness levels and general brain states.”
Take a look at the article here:
2.
With the Air Force’s quote in mind I set out to research what stress levels could lead to in the daily life of the public. The results are a chain of events quite popular around the world as followed:
Higher the stress within a single person gives a much higher chance of depression forming and losing control meaning the mental state of the person would drop significantly as they may become unfocused with what they’re doing.
take a look at this article on teh BBC webpage:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29742908
“Some 10.4 million days are lost annually to work-related stress in the UK, according to the Health and Safety Executive.
The World Health Organization says it costs businesses in the US $300bn (£187bn; €237bn) a year.”
These figures could be dramatically lowered with the use of my concept capturing and stopping depression forming. Or even if you think your becoming depressed don’t call your GP just use this product to quickly diagnose yourself.