Wearable sensors for monitoring drug pharmacokinetics in patients with Parkinson’s disease

Wearable sweat sensors have attracted significant attention in recent years due to their potential for noninvasive health monitoring and point-of-care treatment. In this study, we developed and clinically evaluated wearable electrochemical sweat sensors in 32 patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) at Taichung Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan. PD patients were treated with standard oral L-DOPA formulations, in terms of Madopar or Sinemet. PD symptoms were assessed using standard MDS-UPDRS scores, 10 clinical movement metrics, wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) data, and sweat L-DOPA concentration profiles. Using these multimodal measurements, we found that 79% of PD patients with sufficient sweating showed a moderate to strong negative Spearman correlation (– 1.0 < ρ < – 0.4) between their sweat L-DOPA profiles and hand tremor intensity. These results highlight the potential of wearable sweat sensors for noninvasive monitoring of L-DOPA pharmacokinetics and enabling personalized dosage optimization in PD patients.