A Review of Wearable Sweat Monitoring Platforms: From Biomarker Detection to Signal Processing Systems
Abstract
Wearable electronics hold great potential in defining new paradigms of modern healthcare, including personalized health management, precision medicine, and athletic performance optimization. This stems from their ability in enabling continuous, real-time health monitoring. To enable molecular-level analysis, biofluids rich in molecular analytes have become one of the most important target samples for wearable sensors. Among them, sweat stands out as an ideal candidate for next-generation wearable health monitoring platforms due to its completely noninvasive nature and ease of acquisition. In recent years, several studies have demonstrated feasible prototype designs for sweat-based wearable sensors. However, one of the major gaps toward large-scale commercialization is the development of clinically validated standards for sweat analysis. One key requirement is to establish the relationship between sweat analytes and those of blood, the latter serving as the gold standard in modern diagnostics. This review provides an overview of sweat biomarkers, with a particular focus on their partitioning mechanisms, which reveal the underlying connections between sweat analytes and their counterparts within systemic metabolic pathways. In addition, this review offers a mechanistic-level examination of biosensors employed in sweat sensing, addressing a gap that has not been adequately covered in prior reviews. Given the critical role of electronic systems in constructing highly integrated wearable sweat-monitoring platforms, this review also analyzes the electronic architectures used for sensor signal processing from an interdisciplinary perspective, with particular emphasis on the analog circuitry that interfaces with electrochemical sensors.