This week, Cambridge-based Epicore Biosystems is using the annual CES conference in Las Vegas to announce the upcoming launch of its newest product in its line of sweat-sensing wearables.
In 2021, the company launched its first commercial product with PepsiCo and Gatorade, called the Gx Sweat Patch, which measures things like sweat rate, fluid loss and sodium loss for athletes.
The company is now ready to expand its hydration tech to other industries, including people working in energy, construction and mining. This morning, the company announced its new Connected Hydration sweat patch and mobile app.
Connected Hydration builds on the company’s previous Gx Sweat Patch technology, Roozbeh Ghaffari, CEO and co-founder of Epicore, told BostInno.
“Think of them as complementary. One is tailored more for the industrial worker. More data, more passive collection. And the other is more tailored for sports and fitness,” Ghaffari said.
Connected Hydration consists of a flexible wearable patch that attaches to the bicep, a mobile application and a cloud engine. On the patch is an electronic module that can track sweat fluid and electrolyte loss, skin temperature and movement. It also alerts wearers to rehydrate when their fluid loss exceeds 2% of their body weight. Ghaffari said the company aims to launch Connected Hydration in July 2023, which will collect "second-by-second data" from a user's sweat with the help of electro-chemical sensors.
“So we’re collecting that information in real time, second by second, and then layering in these biophysical measurements on top to provide that holistic view of what you’re doing to generate the level of sweat of electrolytes that we’re seeing,” Ghaffari said.
Ghaffari said the company saw a lot of value in serving what he referred to as “industrial athletes,” or people working in labor-intensive industries. These workers are often working long hours in hot environments, such as oil and gas refineries, Ghaffari said.
“It’s like, think of a football player, except they’d have to work at 10- to 12-hour shifts in 120 degrees Fahrenheit,” Ghaffari said.
Epicore Biosystems is already piloting Connected Hydration with companies including Chevron Corp. (an investor) and Denka Corp., Ghaffari said.
The company sold its Gx Sweat Patch B2B and plans to take the same approach with Connected Hydration.
“Selling directly to corporations across energy, construction, power utilities, even think trucking, warehouse packaging and the military. They’re within this industrial sector,” Ghaffari said. “And we would go directly to the businesses. Which, you know, a lot of cases they have a lot of vested interest in their workers so it’s actually a win-win for all in that sense.”
Nearly one year ago, Epicore Biosystems announced a $10 million fundraise that Ghaffari said helped build out of the capabilities and infrastructure to launch Connected Hydration.
In the future, Ghaffari said the company is interested in other sensing capabilities, like analyzing cortisol and other biomarkers. Epicore is also thinking about what it can learn from sweat by looking at data across populations geographically, by age, and other factors, Ghaffari said.
“It’s super important to be able to look at the data that we’re measuring now and be able to create some predictive algorithms down the road,” Ghaffari said. “It’s not something we would launch with, but I think over time as we collect more and more data, it’s something that you build up. We publish, we validate and then we introduce it into the product.”
