Wearable sweat sensors have the potential to provide valuable information related to the health and disease states of individuals. Existing sweat sensors mainly rely on biomacromolecules, such as enzymes and antibodies, as biorecognition elements to achieve specific quantification of metabolites and hormones. However, these biomacromolecules tend to degrade over time, limiting the sensors’ shelf life and compromising the sensor performance upon environmental changes, such as varying temperature and humidity. Here, we introduce a wearable plasmonic paper-based microfluidic system to continuously and simultaneously quantify sweat loss, sweat rate, and biochemicals in sweat. Plasmonic sensors based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) are label-free and can identify the analytes of interest via the chemical “fingerprint” information. We show that simple and low-cost plasmonic papers allow for detecting and quantifying biochemicals in sweat. The well-defined flow kinetics of paper microfluidic devices enable accurate quantification of sweat loss and sweat rate in real time.
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