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Sweat Sensor

Department​

Chemistry

Summary​

The lab needed a way to track color changes in a selected area, and was also interested in prototyping a wearable device that could handle the same task. They explored existing apps, and could not find anything that would meet their needs, so we created a small, custom iPhone app to handle their data collection.

Key Benefits to the Lab​

  • The automated process produced more reliable results than manual methods

  • Proved that phone based analysis was possible, supporting future funding

Details​

The lab needed a way to monitor a color changing experiment over time. Their existing method was to use an iPhone camera and a free app to analyze the color of an area of the image, change the color space to read the hue value, and then manually type the hue value into a spreadsheet for further analysis. They would repeat this process at 30 second intervals. This manual, error prone process was a good candidate for automation. 

We developed a custom iPhone app that would let the researcher select an area of interest from the picture, and then automatically perform the analysis and record the measurements over time. When the experiment is complete they would export a csv file containing color values in both RGB and HSV format, a time stamp, and a result value based on a formula the researcher provided.