A versatile artificial skin platform for sweat sensor development

Abstract

Research targeting the development of on-body sensors has been significantly growing in recent years – an example is on-skin sweat sensing. However, the wide inter and intra person variability of skin characteristics make in vivo testing of these sensors and included materials such as skin adhesives difficult, which hampers especially the initial development phase of such wearables. Besides the development of wearable sweat sensors, companies developing deodorants, cosmetics, medical adhesives and wearable textiles now need to perform expensive human subjects testing with little control over the exact sweat mechanisms. Hence, there is a need for a realistic, adaptable and stable test platform, or artificial skin. We present a versatile artificial skin platform that faithfully recapitulates skin topography, active sweat pores, skin wetting behaviour and sweat rate, and that can be tuned to mimic the specifications of the targeted body location and sweating characteristics. The developed artificial skin is capable of generating sweat rates as low as 0.1 nL min⁻¹ pore⁻¹ and as high as 100 nL min⁻¹ pore⁻¹, spanning the whole range of physiological sweat rates. Specifically, the platform can be used for the development of sweat sensors for sedentary persons whose sweat rates are commonly lower than currently delivered by any other artificial skin platform.