Investigation of cortisol dynamics in human sweat using a graphene-based wireless mHealth system

By R. M. Torrente‐Rodríguez, J. Tu, Yiran Yang, Jihong Min, Minqiang Wang, Yu Song, You Yu, Changhao Xu, Cui Ye, Waguih William Ishak and 1 more. Matter, 2020

387 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY Understanding and assessing endocrine response to stress is crucial to human performance analysis, stress-related disorder diagnosis, and mental health monitoring. Current approaches for stress monitoring are largely based on questionnaires, which could be very subjective. To avoid stress-inducing blood sampling and to realize continuous, non-invasive, and real-time stress analysis at the molecular levels, we investigate the dynamics of a stress hormone, cortisol, in human sweat using an integrated wireless sensing device. Highly sensitive, selective, and efficient cortisol sensing is enabled by a flexible sensor array that exploits the exceptional performance of laser-induced graphene for electrochemical sensing. Herein, we report the first cortisol diurnal cycle and the dynamic stress response profile constructed from human sweat. Our pilot study demonstrates a strong empirical correlation between serum and sweat cortisol, revealing exciting opportunities offered by sweat analysis toward non-invasive dynamic stress monitoring via wearable and portable sensing platforms.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4be2786955b7c32db22a3986b9b9516b7b94a49f