Honored to be the spin-out company bringing this disruptive technology from Northwestern University Rogers' Lab to the forefront. Northwestern's Querrey InQbation Lab Northwestern University #digitalhealth
Just finished the last ‘instructor-defined’ module in our Bioelectronics Lab course for the quarter – the next and final exercise is a ‘do it yourself’ module, where the students define their own experiments using any combination of the technologies introduced to them up to this point in the course.?The focus this week was on soft, skin-mounted microfluidic devices – sometimes known as ‘lab on the skin’ devices – for analysis of sweat loss, sweat rate, electrolyte levels and electrolyte loss.?Quantitative readout involves digital imaging to track the filling front of sweat as it enters a spiral microfluidic channel and to define the color of a chemical reagent as it reacts with chloride in the sweat in circular reservoirs.?Big thanks to Dr. Da Som Yang and to Youngdo Kim for serving as TAs for this lab! Amusing side-note: our first publication on this technology appeared in Science Translational Medicine in 2016; in 2017 we signed a deal with the president of Gatorade to produce a product based on this technology, through a tiny startup (Epicore Biosystems) that we launched specifically for that purpose; in 2021 the first product was released to consumers as the Gx sweat patch, manufactured at a scale of millions of units in a reel-to-reel process, available through the Gatorade Performance Partner website and at DICK'S Sporting Goods and other stores.?Last month, after a two-year pilot program and extensive process of regulatory approvals, Epicore formally announced advanced wireless devices for monitoring hydration status in the context of worker safety, with large company customers in the oil and gas industry, including Chevron and several others.?These two product platforms are the first examples of commercialized sweat-sensing devices and they are still the only ones launched at scale. Original paper can be found here: https://lnkd.in/gth_29C7 Epicore Biosystems Website: https://lnkd.in/griM5rBE
