Sensors that analyze your sweat and implanted devices that promise to help the brain regulate organs were the topic of conversation earlier today at a WearableTechLA panel moderated by Wearable Tech Insider.
Dr. Victor Pikov, a senior scientist at the Huntington Medical Research Institute in Pasadena, CA, said that GSK and DARPA are putting a combined $100 million of dollars into investigating brain mapping and the interaction between the brain and how it regulates your body. (The DARPA project is called the BRAIN Initiative.) Rather than, for instance, stimulating your pancreas to produce more insulin, the idea is to understand what about the communication between your brain and your pancreas is causing it to not produce the insulin in the first place.
This isn’t a product-tomorrow kind of thing; Pikov said it will be three years before research will start to be done, and maybe another three years before medical trials even begin.
Electrozyme, said CEO Joshua Windmiller, is producing sensors on temporary screen-printed tattoos that can analyze sweat for lactate (a sign of anaerobic exercise), hydration and electrolyte, and ammonia (which is excreted when muscle is breaking down). The company got its start doing research for the Navy, in work that we first heard about earlier this year at the Flextech 2014 conference. Note that this work happens non-invasively; it’s chemistry done on the surface of the skin at very small scale and very low power consumption.
Windmiller said that Electrozyme isn’t interested in producing end-user product; it’s more than happy making the advanced sensors that will find their way into commercial products.
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