Advances in Wearable Biosensors for Non-Invasive Biofluid Monitoring
Mondal & Saikia
The finding, in our words
Wearable biosensors for sweat and saliva can continuously monitor metabolites, electrolytes and disease biomarkers, providing a virtually painless alternative to blood sampling. The review finds electrochemical and optical modalities are most promising for wearable integration, but achieving clinically reliable AI-assisted systems for decentralised care remains challenging.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
This narrative review finds that saliva is best suited to repeated neuroendocrine and metabolic measurements during exercise, sweat is most mature for electrolyte and sweat-rate monitoring with wearable compatibility, and exhaled breath offers access to volatile metabolism but remains instrumentally demanding. Each matrix requires matching to a defined clinical or exercise question with matrix-specific validation before translational use.
Wearable biochemical monitoring requires a complete measurement chain that integrates quality-controlled biofluid sampling, sensor fusion and metadata capture to convert raw sensor outputs into clinically valid digital biomarkers.
Salivary cortisol is suitable as an adjunctive measure in decentralised monitoring, with lateral-flow assays providing rapid low-cost discrete measurements and wearable platforms enabling higher-frequency collection but facing biofouling and calibration challenges. Suitability requires validation in authentic saliva against reference methods, not merely low detection limits.
Wearable biosensors that analyse sweat, saliva and interstitial fluid can detect cancer biomarkers non-invasively, enabling continuous monitoring and fewer clinical visits. Advances in microfluidics and materials have improved sensitivity and specificity, though practical challenges must be addressed before widespread clinical adoption.
Kashaninejad et al., Progress in molecular biology and translational science (paywalled) · source ↗