Wearable technology developed by researchers at Northwestern University was front and center recently in a new Gatorade commercial featuring tennis superstar Serena Williams.
The ad campaign, dubbed “You Fuel Us, We Fuel You," features Williams sporting a wearable patch designed by Northwestern researcher John Rogers that analyzes the chemistry of your sweat. The skin-mounted device measures the amount of electrolyte loss in the user, communicates wirelessly to other devices, and is as thin and flexible as a temporary tattoo.
Developed in 2016 with Yonggang Huang, Rogers and his Rogers Lab at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering manufactured the device in hopes of taking wearable technology innovation beyond counting your steps. The ad, which also features NBA star Jayson Tatum, shows Williams wearing the patch as she's working out.
“I’ve always been really interested in innovation and technology, so when [Gatorade] first told me about the idea, I thought, ‘My god, if we could really harness the information about our sweat, how it influences our energy, what electrolytes we need exactly to improve performance, it would be crazy,'” Williams told Fast Company.
The wearable can also provide non-intrusive screenings for certain diseases, and in the future it could go inside your body to fix things like an irregular heartbeat, Northwestern says.
Northwestern's technology isn't the first attempt to improve upon today's existing wearable devices. Boston startup Whoop has created a high-tech wearable device that captures tons of data about an athlete's performance and has raised nearly $50 million in funding. Rithmio, a Chicago startup that developed software for advanced wearable devices, built technology that aimed to more accurately measure movement, but the startup shut down in 2017.
