{"id":218556,"date":"2025-07-23T12:06:20","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T17:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/wearable-sensor-could-help-patients-with-bipolar-disorder-track-medication-levels-through-sweat"},"modified":"2025-07-23T12:06:20","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T17:06:20","slug":"wearable-sensor-could-help-patients-with-bipolar-disorder-track-medication-levels-through-sweat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/wearable-sensor-could-help-patients-with-bipolar-disorder-track-medication-levels-through-sweat","title":{"rendered":"Wearable sensor could help patients with bipolar disorder track medication levels through sweat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/wearable-sensor-could-help-patients-with-bipolar-disorder-track-medication-levels-through-sweat2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Although lithium is highly effective in treating bipolar disorder, the chemical has a narrow therapeutic window\u2014too high a dose can be toxic to patients, causing kidney damage, thyroid damage, or even death, while too low a dose renders the treatment ineffective.<\/p>\n<p>The dose of lithium varies between individuals based on <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/body+weight\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">body weight<\/a>, diet, and other physiological factors, and requires regular measurement of lithium levels in the blood. Currently, this is only available through standard laboratory-based blood draws, which can be time-consuming, inconvenient, and painful. This makes personalized and easily-accessible lithium monitoring an important goal in the treatment for <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/bipolar+disorder\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">bipolar disorder<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur goal was to create an easy-to-use sensor that bypasses the need for blood draws entirely,\u201d explained Yasser Khan, a USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering professor who leads the USC Khan Lab, and part of the USC Institute for Technology and Medical Systems (ITEMS), a joint initiative of USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Keck School of Medicine of USC focusing on innovative medical devices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although lithium is highly effective in treating bipolar disorder, the chemical has a narrow therapeutic window\u2014too high a dose can be toxic to patients, causing kidney damage, thyroid damage, or even death, while too low a dose renders the treatment ineffective. The dose of lithium varies between individuals based on body weight, diet, and other [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,1977],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-wearables"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}