Making It
SweatID tracks hydration during exercise
8/8/2022 | 3m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
SweatID gives athletes data to accurately rehydrate during work, training or competition.
Cleveland State University Associate Professor Chelsea Monty-Bromer began working with health sensors in 2010 while developing a fabric-based temperature sensor for use in prosthetic devices. Using this same technology, she created the SweatID patch, which provides real-time hydration information by selectively targeting sodium levels on the skin.
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Making It is a local public television program presented by Ideastream
Making It
SweatID tracks hydration during exercise
8/8/2022 | 3m 33sVideo has Closed Captions
Cleveland State University Associate Professor Chelsea Monty-Bromer began working with health sensors in 2010 while developing a fabric-based temperature sensor for use in prosthetic devices. Using this same technology, she created the SweatID patch, which provides real-time hydration information by selectively targeting sodium levels on the skin.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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So it's really exciting but it's also terrifying at the same time.
(bright music) My name is Chelsea Monty-Bromer, and I am the founder and Chief Technology Officer at SweatID.
At SweatID, we're developing wearable fabric sensors to teach athletes about their sweat to prevent illness and injury.
What everyone has is a very unique sweat profile.
So we give you that unique information, you can take it to someone with training and the credentials to give you a hydration plan and they can give you a rehydration strategy so that you can maintain your proper electrolyte levels throughout the day.
We started this process about 12 years ago, and I think it's even more exciting now than it was 12 years ago.
Because 12 years ago, it was a little piece of white fabric we were developing in the lab but we never tested it on people.
And so, as soon as we started doing testing in an exercise science lab, that's when it really started to get really exciting and now we're testing it on people where we just send them the sensor and they test it without us.
So now I would like to introduce Shelby Daniels.
She is our chemical engineer at SweatID, and she's gonna walk you through how we make the non-woven fabric that we use as the base for our sensor.
- This is our electro spinning box.
With this, we make nylon mats that we then treat and transform into our sensors.
- After we make the non-woven nylon mat, we cut it into small squares.
We make it conductive and then we add a functionalization to grab the sodium from the sweat so we can selectively measure sodium while our athletes are sweating.
- Next we take our non-woven sensor piece and we make it into what we call an assembled sensor.
After we finish embroidering the sensor, we attach a 3D printed backing piece that helps give some stability to the sensor, and then we move over and use our snap press to attach two snaps on each side.
And from there, we have a finished product like this.
- So once we have our completed sensor assembly, we are then ready to use it on an athlete.
So we have our reusable electronics and we have our kind of reusable SweatID compatible armband.
So what we do is we since snap the sensor, we can put it on our athlete and at the end of their exercise it tells them their sweat sodium concentration that they can take then to have a personalized hydration plant made.
At SweatID, we really wanna revolutionize how people think about wearable technology.
We wanna integrate sensors in the clothing that people are wearing every day.
We are doing a small product launch to our launch customer in Q1 of 2023.
We hope to be commercially available to all users in 2024.
So we get asked a lot about, okay, well, how does the typical person wear this and what can they learn?
The answer is we don't really know yet.
Studies have shown that knowing about what some of the different parameters in your sweat are can help you prevent illness and injury and increase your athletic performance.
But because we've never had kind of this real time monitor before, we don't know.
So the sky's really the limit.
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