There is a need for real-time unobtrusive monitoring of the vital body chemistry and general health status of military personnel during training and in hostile battlefield environments. Monitoring the health of a soldier who is an integral part of a military mission is important, because a compromise in his/her ability to act at a certain moment could jeopardize the operation. The most accessible measure of a person's health at any given instant is his/her anaerobic metabolism rate (O₂ debt), which is indicative of the changes in skeletal muscle and cerebral oxygenation. Anaerobic metabolism data can be used by paramedics to save lives. Lactate levels are important measure of oxygen debt. Lactate is a weak acid that is produced by cells when they break down glucose to produce energy by anaerobic metabolism (a chemical process that does not require oxygen). In this project we developed, constructed, and tested a compact personal optical sensor for monitoring lactate via sweat metabolite analysis. The sensor quantifies the change of the optical properties caused by lactate chemistry. Our miniaturized noninvasive lactate sensor measures minute changes of the lactate between 0-130 mM in near real time.

Date Published: 4 August 2000
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 4037, Digitization of the Battlespace V and Battlefield Biomedical Technologies II, (4 August 2000); doi: 10.1117/12.395047

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4037:
Digitization of the Battlespace V and Battlefield Biomedical Technologies II
Raja Suresh; Homer H. Pien; Homer H. Pien, Editor(s)