The majority of fitness trackers offer pretty standard fitness tracking features, such as the steps we’ve taken, distance walked/run, calories burned, and heart rate. These are considered to be “basic” functions that most people would expect from such trackers, but it is possible that in the future our trackers could become more complex and better at gathering data.
An example of that would be recent work done by researchers at Stanford in which they have developed a wearable that is capable of measuring the wearer’s cortisol levels. For those unfamiliar, cortisol (also known as the stress hormone) is useful for tracking things like how well you’re performing physically as it reflects how your adrenal and pituitary glands are working. To that end it can also help detect any problems with your body based on that.
However current methods of measuring cortisol levels can take several days of lab work, which means that by the time the results are back, it might not be as relevant anymore. However the researchers have created a wearable that when worn on the skin can wick up sweat and based on that, assess how much cortisol a person is producing and give back the results more or less instantly.
According to Onur Parlak, a post-doctoral scholar in the Salleo lab and lead author of the paper, “We are particularly interested in sweat sensing, because it offers noninvasive and continuous monitoring of various biomarkers for a range of physiological conditions. This offers a novel approach for the early detection of various diseases and evaluation of sports performance.” The wearable is still being worked on as it isn’t perfect yet, but its potential is obvious although it might probably be a while before we see it in consumer devices.
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