In a world where the unmanned spacecraft landed on Mars And artificial intelligence If you could read your mind, one would think someone had found an accurate way to measure how much athletes should drink during exercise. Hydration, or replacing body fluids lost through perspiration, exhalation, and waste removal, is essential. When 2% or more of body mass is lost to dehydration, the body can go into a state of confusion, with increased cardiovascular stress, reduced aerobic exercise performance, and impaired function. thermostat. After losing 12% of body mass due to dehydration, human will die.
It is very rare for an athlete to exercise to the point of death from dehydration. But it’s also odd considering that, for such an important physiological need, many athletes rely on thirst as a definitive guide to how much water they should stay hydrated during exercise. The trouble with that integrated system has two sides. By the time your brain registers that you need water, your body is usually already dehydrated. Plus, it’s easy to quench your thirst before you’ve fully rehydrated.
Outside of the laboratory, the most accurate standard for determining an athlete’s water loss is a nude body weight before and after activity. (For every pound of body mass lost, 16 ounces of water should be consumed.) But that method doesn’t help runners determine how much fluid they’ve lost during a 16-mile marathon.
Cyclists can rely on a global locator with flashing drink alarm reminding to take a sip from a water bottle every 15 minutes. Joggers and exercise mice can wear a smart watch with a hydration sensor, like Apple Watch, which uses electrodes placed on the skin to measure the conductivity of the wearer’s sweat. This can determine the concentration of electrolytes (or electrolyte deficiency) in sweat, helping to determine the user’s hydration level. There is also a $25 gadget called GX sweat patch, marketed by Gatorade, a single-use biosensor that, when applied to the inside of the left forearm, measures a person’s rate of perspiration, fluid loss, and sodium loss. use. When that data is transferred to the companion iOS app, it acts as a guide to the athlete’s future performance.
Until recently, however, biosensor technology was able to analyze athletes’ sweat composition to provide personalized, real-time hydration recommendations as they exercise. was out of reach because sensor technology couldn’t afford to be integrated into a consumer product.
Photo: Nix . biosensor
In December, a Boston startup founded by marathon runner and Harvard Business School graduate Meridith Cass revealed Nix . hydration biosensor, the first wearable sensor that promises to deliver real-time sweat science to athletes. Cass, also a former college basketball player, started thinking about biosensor technology to measure water after she struggled with her body’s response to heat and humidity during exercise. practice for a marathon. She said: “I felt very sluggish during some of those longer runs, and I wondered, ‘could there be a hydration sensor? And does anyone else find it useful but me?’”
The Nix works like this: When attached to the upper arm (via a protective film on the underside of the patch, about the size of a circular orange slice), the patch measures body sweat locally. set, extrapolate it to the whole. area of the body through calculation algorithm. As sweat flows through the electrodes on the upper arm patch, the patch measures the sweat content twice along its flow path. By comparing the data at those two locations, the sensor can tell how fast fluid is moving in the body. When connected via Bluetooth to the iOS companion app, the sensor will forward hydration notification to the phone at a user-customizable interval. The point is to keep athletes, when they are training, within 1 percent of their initial body mass (or 1 percent of water loss) to avoid the uncomfortable pitfalls that come with this condition. dehydration.
