Sweat was the problem. Then it became the power source: an e-skin that reads the body through its own perspiration

Every wearable health sensor fights the same enemy: sweat makes patches slide and signals blur. A team led by Professor Xiu Liang at Qilu University of Technology in China stopped fighting it. Their electronic skin — a patch thinner than a hair, made of silk and silver nanowires — drinks the sweat in, sticks better for it, and uses it to read the body: heart signals on one channel, and the chemistry of sweat itself on another, hunting molecules linked to gout, heart-rhythm problems and even early Parkinson's disease, with no needle in sight. In the lab it also cut growth of two common bacteria by about half. It is early work, published in Advanced Functional Materials, and clinics are years away — but the idea is elegantly simple: the signal was in the sweat all along.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation