It’s ‘no sweat’ to use sweat to check your health!

It’s ‘no sweat’ to use sweat to check your health!

Emma Moonen defended her PhD thesis cum laude, which is about sweat monitoring with a microfluidic device, at the Department of Mechanical Engineering on March 7th as TU/e celebrates International Women’s Day.

We live in a world where smartphones and fitness trackers have made health checking the norm. Heart rate, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure are just some of the things that people follow with devices. To get crucial health information though requires tests on blood samples, which can only be carried out at hospitals and completed by trained personnel. But a blood sample just gives a snapshot of a person’s health at one moment in time. In other words, testing blood samples does not give continuous monitoring. So, PhD researcher Emma Moonen turned to another bodily fluid to solve the problem – sweat. She developed an innovative device that analyzes tiny amounts of sweat from a fingertip or arm and could be used to check for signs of disease or conditions in the future.

Giving a blood sample can be a traumatic process, to say the least. Some people are afraid of needles, some are afraid of the sight of blood, while others are afraid that they’ll faint.

“I’ve got a minor fear of needles, and I don’t like the idea of drawing blood with a needle. So, I’m not a fan of the whole process of going to a hospital to do it,” says Emma Moonen, PhD researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The need for blood

Taking a blood sample is often necessary though, particularly when medical personnel need precise information about the body. This information is associated with so-called biomarkers – molecules linked to normal processes in the body, but they could also indicate a condition or disease.

“The drawing of blood is invasive – there is no escaping the needle,” says Moonen. “It also takes time for the medical personnel to take the blood sample, while the patient needs to travel to a specific location, which in some cases is not ideal for them either.”

The use of blood also makes biomarker tracking non-continuous. “Taking a blood sample provides a snapshot of the concentration of biomarkers in the blood at a single point in time. It’s like a photograph of the biomarkers in the blood at one moment in time rather than a movie, which would show how the biomarkers change in concentration over a period.”

Ideally, healthcare professionals and patients alike would both be keen to monitor biomarkers in a non-invasive, continuous, and effortless way. So, to achieve this goal, for her PhD research, Moonen turned to another bodily fluid – sweat!

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Read the whole article and extended description of Emma's PhD here.