A wearable sweat rate sensor enabling continuous exercise performance evaluation

Sweat rate sensing is essential for evaluating a physical load during the exercise. An individual analysis of the perspiration would provide a beneficial guide for personalized physical activities. As a wearable health monitoring platform, we have developed a flexible flow rate sensor that can measure sweat flow rate with the order of several μL/min. The developed sensor relies on the convective thermal transfer to quantify the flow rate around a microheater in a microchannel embedded in a polyimide film. With appropriate signal processing, we found that evaluation of a physical exercise of a human is possible using our developed sensor.