Investigation of cortisol dynamics in human sweat using a graphene-based wireless mHealth system

Abstract

Understanding and assessing endocrine response to stress is crucial to human performance analysis, stress-related disorder diagnosis, and mental health monitoring. Current approaches for stress monitoring are largely based on questionnaires, which could be very subjective. To avoid stress-inducing blood samplingandtorealizecontinuous,non-invasive,andreal-timestressanalysisat the molecular levels, we investigate the dynamics of a stress hormone, cortisol, in humansweatusinganintegratedwirelesssensingdevice.Highlysensitive,selective, and efficient cortisol sensing is enabled by a flexible sensor array that exploits the exceptional performance of laser-induced graphene for electrochemicalsensing.Here,wereportthefirstcortisoldiurnalcycleandthedynamic stress-response profile constructed from human sweat. Our pilot study demonstrates a strong empirical correlation between serum and sweat cortisol, revealing exciting opportunities offered by sweat analysis toward non-invasive dynamic stress monitoring via wearable and portable sensing platforms.