Your sweat holds a wealth of information about your health
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“Wow, you’re so salty,” said Stefan van der Fluit, looking at my data. I could have told him. I had just finished a sweaty 45-minute workout on the exercise bike, and the salt was already starting to crystallize on my T-shirt. But Vanderflut knows exactly how salty it is. I just eliminated 347 mg of sodium from 370 ml of water. From a sodium perspective, this is on the high side and I need to supplement.
Van der Fluit is the co-founder of Flowbio, a London-based company that provides sweat analysis to athletes. During workouts, I wear a sensor called the S1 on my upper arm, which collects sweat in a tiny channel, automatically measures its volume and sodium concentration, and transmits the data to a smartphone app. Using this data, the app can calculate my total loss.
If I were an endurance athlete, this data would be extremely valuable and could be the difference between winning and losing. I’m not, but Vanderflut is. As a competitive cyclist, he had chronic problems with dehydration. But since he started using the sweat sensor, those issues disappeared and his performance improved.
Flowbio’s S1 is one of the few wearable sweat sensors to hit the market in the past few years. They’re primarily aimed at people who sweat a lot during the course of their work – athletes and manual workers – but they can also…
