Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 14, 2026
Mapping Metabolism: Monitoring Lactate Dehydrogenase Activity Directly in Tissue
Published on: June 21, 2018
Monitoring blood lactate dynamics through sweat and interstitial fluid biofluids
Tamara Boscarino1, Omeed Djassemi2, Muhammad Inam Khan3
1Department of Engineering, Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, Via Alvaro del Portillo 21, Rome, Italy; Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, USA.
Abstract:
Blood lactate monitoring has received considerable recent attention across sports science, clinical medicine, and other fields. This has driven rapid advancements in sensing technology for athletic applications, positioning sweat and interstitial fluid (ISF) as promising alternatives to blood for lactate measurement. While the relationship between ISF lactate and blood lactate has been more extensively investigated, the connection between blood lactate and the dynamic biochemical composition of sweat remains insufficiently characterized for physiological fitness assessment. In this study, we utilized a dual-wearable sensor system, comprising of a microneedle-based ISF lactate sensor and a touch-based electrochemical patch for simultaneous sweat lactate and pH measurements. Multiple healthy adult participants wore a microneedle (MN) patch and used a touch-sweat biosensor on their fingers while performing 15 min of aerobic exercise. The lactate MN biosensor continuously measured ISF lactate concentrations in real-time using chronoamperometry, while the sweat sensor recorded amperometric lactate and potentiometric pH measurements at 15-min intervals. These outputs, along with heart rate (HR) data, were analyzed and compared against capillary blood lactate levels. The results indicated a strong correlation between ISF lactate and blood lactate (ρ = 0.93), a moderate correlation with heart rate (ρ = 0.46), and weak correlations with sweat lactate (ρ = 0.36) and pH (ρ = 0.23) (n = 4). These findings support the potential of microneedle-based ISF sensors for continuous and minimally invasive estimation of blood lactate towards real-time monitoring for aerobic training. Such simultaneous dual-biofluid lactate monitoring highlights the reliability of ISF lactate as a proxy for systemic lactate levels, while the touch-based sweat lactate and pH sensors provide a non-invasive, qualitative tool for tracking lactate trends in less stringent performance contexts.
