In-Vivo Validation of Smart Device for on Body Hydration Monitoring.

Dehydration can lead to serious health complications if not timely prevented, especially in the elderly. In-house point-of-care hydration monitoring devices can help to predict and detect such conditions. However, at the moment, a fully wearable medical healthcare device for dehydration monitoring is not available. We propose here the design and the preliminary in-vivo experiments of a multisensory wearable device for continuous dehydration monitoring, which includes inkjet printed flexible sensors on a bracelet-shaped substrate for temperature, body impedance, and skin hydration monitoring, combined with a small-size, low-power, fully custom-designed front-end read-out circuit. In particular, after shortly presenting the calibration and the performances of the sensors in-vitro, we report an in-vivo characterization and application case studies showing the use of the proposed platform to discriminate different hydration levels. Overall, the reported results represent interesting insights into in-vivo usability of the proposed approach to discriminate different levels of hydration.