Digital health company Epicore Biosystems has entered into a new partnership with 3M’s health care business and medical device maker Innovize to scale the development of its portfolio of advanced sweat-sensing wearable technology.
The partnership intends to combine Epicore Biosystems’ science-backed wearable hydration technology with 3M’s skin-interfacing materials and Innovize’s manufacturing capabilities.
Epicore Biosystems chief product officer and co-founder Jeffrey Model said: “Our collaboration with 3M and Innovize ensures that Epicore Biosystems has a strong domestic production infrastructure.
“We’re thrilled to collaborate with material science and manufacturing powerhouses as we expand our suite of clinically-validated, sweat-sensing products and pave the way for the future of noninvasive health tracking wearables.”
Epicore Biosystems is said to produce wearable solutions that measure sweat biometrics and deliver personalised recovery insights about hydration by using an unobtrusive wearable sweat sensor.
The insights include sweat rate, electrolyte concentrations, total sweat loss, bioanalyte loss, skin temperature, and motion. These are all processed by a proprietary cloud engine and sent directly to the wearer via a smartphone app and cloud portal, said the digital health company.
The firm said that its sweat-sensing wearable technology has flexible physical properties for seamless integration on the body. It also comes with multimodal data streams for direct measurements of stress, hydration, and nutritional status.
Under the partnership, Epicore Biosystems’ product development will use materials and design principles developed alongside Innovize to facilitate large volume production.
Innovize produces microfluidic structures at high throughput using the roll-to-roll (R2R) technology, in a manner akin to printing a newspaper, said Epicore Biosystems.
According to the digital health company, R2R transforms thin polymeric sheets of off-the-shelf materials from 3M as well as other material suppliers into useful microfluidic components and finished goods for producing its products.
Epicore Biosystems’ line of sweat-sensing wearables includes the Gx Sweat Patch, the Discovery Patch Sweat Collection System, and the Connected Hydration wearable hydration sensor and mobile application.
