The development of wearable technologies and their potential for measuring nutrient intake: Towards precision nutrition

Abstract

Appropriate food intake and nutritional status are crucial for the maintenance of health and disease prevention. Conventional dietary assessment is mainly based on comparisons of nutrient intakes with reference intakes, failing to meet the needs of personalised nutritional guidance based on individual nutritional status. Given their capability of providing insights into health information non-invasively in real time, wearable technologies offer great opportunities for nutrition monitoring. Nutrient metabolic profiles can be monitored immediately and continuously which could potentially offer the possibility for the tracking and guiding of nutrient intake. Here, we review and highlight the recent advances in wearable sensors from the perspective of sensing technologies for nutrient detection in biofluids. The integration of biosensors with wearable devices serves as an ideal platform for the analysis of biofluids including sweat, saliva and tears. The wearable sensing systems applied to the analysis of typical nutrients and important metabolites are demonstrated in terms of carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, vitamins, minerals and others. Taking advantage of their high flexibility and lightweight, wearable sensors have been widely developed for the in situ quantitative detection of metabolic biomarkers. The technical principles, detection methods and applications are summarised. The challenges and future perspectives for wearable nutrition monitoring devices are discussed including the need to better determine relationships among nutrient metabolic profile, nutrient intake and food intake. With the development of materials, sensing techniques and manufacturing processes, wearable technologies are paving the way towards personalised precision nutrition, although there is still a long way to go before they can be utilised for practical clinical applications. Joint research efforts between nutrition scientists, doctors, engineers and sensor researchers are essential to further accelerate the realisation of reliable and practical wearable nutrition monitoring platforms.

Keywords: biosensors; flexible electronics; food intake; nutrition analysis; personalised precision nutrition; wearable sensors.