In the world Now that unmanned spacecraft have landed on Mars and artificial intelligence can read human minds, some think someone has found a way to accurately gauge how much an athlete should drink during exercise. there will be It is essential to stay hydrated or replace body fluids lost through sweating, exhalation and excretion of waste products. Your body can become confused, such as decreased blood pressure and impaired thermoregulation. A human dies when he loses 12% of his body weight due to dehydration.
Athletes rarely exercise enough to die of dehydration. But with such an important physiological need, it’s strange to think that many athletes rely on thirst as the definitive guide for how much to drink during exercise. There are two problems with that embedded system. By the time your brain realizes it needs water, your body is often already dehydrated. Also, it’s easy to quench your thirst before you’re fully hydrated.
Outside of the laboratory, the most accurate standard for determining fluid loss in athletes is weighing themselves naked before and after activity. should be consumed.
Cyclists can rely on GPS computers with drink alarms that flash reminders to take a sip from their water bottle every 15 minutes. Runners and gym rats can wear smartwatches with hydration sensors like the Apple Watch. It uses electrodes placed on the skin to measure the electrical conductivity of the wearer’s sweat. This allows us to determine the concentration (or lack thereof) of electrolytes in sweat, which helps determine the user’s hydration level. There’s also a $25 gadget sold by Gatorade called the GX Sweat Patch. This is a disposable biosensor that, when applied to the inside of the left forearm, measures a user’s perspiration, water loss, and sodium loss. Once that data is transferred to the companion iOS app, it serves as a guideline for the athlete’s future performance.
However, until recently, biosensing technology capable of analyzing an athlete’s sweat content to provide personalized, real-time hydration recommendations during exercise has not been affordable enough to be incorporated into consumer products. Therefore, it was out of reach. .
Photo: Nix Biosensors
In December, a Boston startup founded by Harvard Business School graduate and marathon runner Meridith Cass unveiled the Nix Hydration Biosensor, the first wearable sensor that promises to bring real-time sweating science to athletes. . Kath, who is also a former college basketball player, started thinking about biosensing technology to measure hydration after struggling with her body’s response to heat and humidity while training for a marathon. Some were feeling very sluggish,” she says. And do you think anyone else can be of help besides me?”
Nix works like this: Attached to the biceps (through a protective film underneath the patch, it is approximately the size of an orange slice), the patch locally measures the body’s sweat profile and completely removes insert. Algorithmically calculated body area. As sweat drips across the electrodes of the bicep patch, the patch measures the sweat content along its flow path twice. By comparing the data from these two locations, the sensor can tell how fast the fluid is moving through the body. When connected via Bluetooth to the iOS companion app, the sensor relays hydration notifications to your phone at user-customized intervals. The point is to keep athletes within 1 percent of their starting weight (or 1 percent of dehydration) while working out to avoid the nasty pitfalls of dehydration.
