Customer Background

The target customers of this product are mainly concentrated in the field of sports and health technology, including professional sports teams, sports colleges, professional and amateur endurance athletes (such as marathon runners, triathletes, cycling enthusiasts). Its research and development company has refreshed its biosensing technology by establishing a hardware ecosystem cooperation with the globally renowned wearable device company Garmin, integrating its products into its outdoor sports watch and watch system, marking the official entry of technology into the mass consumer market. From its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo and plans to expand its detection metrics, it can be seen that the company is currently in the stage of market expansion and ecosystem building, with a growing business scale.

Customer needs and pain points

Training supply depends on experience and feeling: Athletes cannot accurately grasp the real-time needs of their body for water, electrolytes, and energy during long-term high-intensity training. The traditional "drink when thirsty" or fixed interval replenishment methods can easily lead to insufficient hydration causing a decrease in dehydration performance, or excessive hydration causing gastrointestinal discomfort.
Fatigue and injury risks are difficult to predict: phenomena such as exercise-induced muscle spasms, hypoglycemia, and "wall crashing" often occur suddenly. Relying solely on traditional exercise data such as heart rate and speed cannot provide biochemical advance warning of risks caused by excessive loss of electrolytes (such as potassium and sodium) or depletion of glycogen.
Outdated sweat detection methods: Traditional sweat detection requires collecting samples and sending them to the laboratory for analysis, which is cumbersome, time-consuming, and unable to provide real-time feedback, making it completely unsuitable for use in training and competitions.

Traditional design schemes and their limitations

Traditional wearable devices, such as smartwatches and heart rate bands, mainly monitor physical and exercise data such as heart rate, steps, GPS trajectory, etc., and cannot directly monitor the body's biochemical indicators and metabolic status.
Disposable sweat test patch or laboratory testing: can only provide static results after a single test, lacks continuous dynamic data, and cannot be used for real-time decision-making during training.
General supply advice: A hydration and salt supplement guide based on the average value of the population, ignoring the significant differences in sweat composition and sweat rate among individuals, resulting in a low degree of personalization.

Implementation plan

The core of AbsolutSweat's solution is to use non-invasive and continuous sweat biosensing technology to digitize and real-time biochemical indicators, and integrate them with exercise data to form a personalized closed-loop.
Implementation and selection:
Hardware composition: the main body of the scheme is a reusable lipstick like host (S1 sensor) and a disposable replaceable microfluidic sweat detection patch. Users can stick the patch on their upper chest or back (adjusted according to actual sweating), and then attach it to the host to start working.
Data Fusion: The device is connected to a dedicated app via Bluetooth. The key breakthrough lies in the deep integration with the Garmin watch/watch ecosystem, where exercise data (heart rate, speed, altitude, temperature and humidity) and sweat biochemical data (sodium, potassium, glucose, sweat rate) are fused and calculated in real-time on the Garmin device, allowing for replenishment reminders to be received on the watch without the need to operate a mobile phone.

Our design scheme logic

Core technology: Sweat reacts with sensitive materials through microchannels inside the patch, generating electrical signals that are captured by the host and converted into concentration data.
Algorithm model: Based on real-time collected sweat indicators and exercise data, construct a scientific replenishment model of "environment intensity consumption replenishment recovery". This model can dynamically calculate the degree of dehydration, electrolyte loss rate, and energy consumption trend.
Output and decision-making: The model will provide "personalized hydration and salt supplementation suggestions" during training through an APP or Garmin device, and provide a personalized nutrition supplementation plan within the "30 minute golden recovery window" after training (including specific amounts of water, electrolytes, protein, and carbohydrates).

Results and Data

Real time monitoring and warning: achieved minute by minute refresh monitoring of sodium, potassium, glucose loss rate and sweat rate. It can issue a warning through abnormal potassium ion loss rate before muscle spasms occur, prompting users to replenish in a timely manner.
Personalized supply enhancement performance: Based on real-time data, dynamic supply decisions help users allocate supplies more scientifically in sports such as marathons and long-distance cycling, improve exercise endurance, and effectively break through the "wall hitting period".
Quantitative recovery effect: providing new quantitative indicators such as fatigue index and dehydration tolerance. By following their personalized recovery plan, users can achieve more efficient physical recovery and avoid insufficient or excessive nutritional supplementation.
Actual test data: In user testing, the device successfully started providing real-time data during the training period (about 35 minutes later), monitoring a sweat rate of 635ml per hour and providing specific recommendations for sodium, potassium supplementation, and protein intake.

Customer feedback

Professional athlete/coach: "(It) freed me from speculation. Now I know exactly when to add what, which completely changed my training and competition strategy
The vision of the R&D team is not only to upgrade sensors, but also to revolutionize the paradigm of sports and health data. When we transform the biological information in sweat into executable digital language, we can understand the real needs of the body at the molecular level
User experience: "The device reminds me to replenish water in the 40th minute. After training, analysis shows that my sodium loss curve needs attention, but my potassium level is normal, which makes my subsequent replenishment very targeted

Scheme reuse

Ecological Expansion: This technology has been successfully promoted and integrated from standalone devices into Garmin's global wearable hardware ecosystem, marking the recognition of its solution by mainstream sports hardware platforms and laying the foundation for large-scale promotion.
Horizontal expansion of technology: The R&D team has successfully developed a prototype sweat patch that can measure lactate, and plans to develop specialized detection patches for more biomarkers (such as cortisol, urea, etc.) in the next few years, expanding their applications from sports performance to a wider range of health stress and metabolic monitoring fields.

In summary, AbsolutSweat is providing athletes with an unprecedented perspective on their internal body by miniaturizing, real-time, and popularizing laboratory level sweat biochemical analysis, and integrating it with a mature sports data ecosystem. It is driving the transformation of sports training from a "perception experience based" to a "data-driven" approach.