Wearable physiological systems and technologies for metabolic monitoring
Gao et al.
The finding, in our words
Continuous glucose monitoring in interstitial fluid provides diabetes patients with a tool for insulin dosing and diet planning that avoids the pain and inconvenience of fingerstick testing. Wearable sensors can also track lactate, sodium, potassium and hydrogen ions in sweat, and as methods to correlate these with blood concentrations improve, the technology will become valuable for monitoring people under extreme physiological stress.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
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.
This review assesses wearable sensors for the continuous biochemical monitoring of body fluids such as sweat, saliva and interstitial fluid, confirming their potential for decentralised healthcare through pilot trials. It emphasises that successful clinical translation depends on large-scale validation and the integration of ethical and sociocultural considerations.
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.
A fully remote decentralised clinical trial in Danish adults with type 2 diabetes demonstrated operational feasibility with rapid recruitment, high retention (87 percent), and excellent adherence to continuous glucose monitoring (95 percent achieving ≥70 percent data coverage) and telemedicine visits (97 percent). Activity tracker adherence was poor (12 percent) due to technical issues, but remote safety monitoring was effective with no unexpected adverse events, supporting the viability of remote diabetes management.