Temperatures on a work site can reach extreme temperatures, which places employees in danger. Keeping employees hydrated and healthy requires more than just drinking liquids; monitoring their health can help protect them.

With its Connected Hydration platform, Epicore Biosystems has developed a solution that can help solve these problems. The platform has earned honors, most recently the prestigious Red Dot Award for exceptional product design.

Epicore’s  Connected Hydration platform is the first sweat-sensing wearable patch and mobile app. It provides workers with personalized, real-time insights into sweat volume loss, electrolyte loss, body temperature and body movement. This can be critical for employees working physical jobs, from warehousing, farming and construction to trucking, oil and gas and military.

“We are honored to be recognized for product design excellence by the design jurists at Red Dot,” said Stephen Lee, CTO at Epicore Biosystems, in accepting the award. “It’s a reflection of the care we have for our customers who labor in the heat. We were very intentional with how we designed and built the entire Connected Hydration solution to effortlessly empower workers to stay safe and stay hydrated.”

Matt Marrapode, VP of strategy, Epicore Biosystems, said that Epicore first started developing the initial Connected Hydration prototypes in 2021.

“At that time, we were constantly iterating and adding/subtracting features,” said Marrapode. “We received a lot of positive feedback from customers on a few key features, like the haptics alarm functionality which is now incorporated in the commercialized Connected Hydration solution.”

This iterative approach culminated in early adopter deployments in the summer of 2023, leading to hardware/software cloud certifications in January 2024 and commercial launch in May 2024.

The Connected Hydration platform is a biowearable that measures sweat loss, sodium loss, skin temperature, and body movement.

“By measuring these biometrics in real-time, Connected Hydration empowers workers to proactively combat the harmful effects of dehydration and heat exposure through personalized hydration feedback,” Marrapode reported. “Workers experience personalized fluid-electrolyte intake suggestions directly on their smartphone mobile app. Anonymized population hydration data and environmental factors are also captured on the Cloud dashboard, enabling health and safety personnel to develop hydration strategies across the workforce.”

Marrapode noted that Epicore faced some major challenges with developing the Connected Hydration platform, but the Epicore team overcame it.

“Developing a next-generation wearable solution for frontline workers requires foresight into intrinsic safety demands, cloud security requirements, and understanding the needs of connected workers in the field, which tends to differ from more traditional consumer environments,” said Marrapode. “We have been fortunate to work with Chevron Corp and multiple other early adopter enterprises to test and deploy Connected Hydration during the early prototype stages through to commercialization. The learnings and customer feedback have been instrumental in building a robust and effective solution.”

Marrapode pointed out that there are numerous applications where Connected Hydration sensors can be used.

“Connected Hydration is used frequently by industrial athletes working on the frontlines of physically intensive industries including energy, construction, mining, utilities, agriculture, trucking and warehouse packaging, as well as military personnel,” he said. “It has been deployed across multiple industrial sectors, including oil and gas, military, engineering services, shipping, climate technology, chemical plants, construction and manufacturing, and with over 20 multinational corporations, across four continents.”

Marrapode said that Epicore is seeing a lot of interest from large companies and enterprises across the globe.

“With the new proposed heat standard in the US from OSHA, workplaces across the US are looking for new seamless ways to comply and protect their workforce,” Marrapode noted. “The extreme heat over the past few years and this year, in particular, has raised awareness for the problem at hand. We’re trying our best to try to educate the public with data and insights to counteract the effects of climate change.”

“The feedback we’ve received thus far, from workers and health and safety leaders, has been extremely positive,” Marrapode said. “Workers particularly like how easy the sensor is to use daily and enjoyed learning about their individual hydration needs in high-heat environments. Health and safety managers have gravitated towards the real-time hydration and alarm data across different work functions, especially when extreme weather fronts are on the horizon.”

Connected Hydration isn’t the only product that Epicore is currently developing.

“We are advancing new sensing capabilities including stress biomarkers, metabolites, and proteins,” Marrapode observed. “Sweat is a rich biofluid and Connected Hydration serves as a platform to unlock various biomarkers relevant to industrial workers, athletes, and average consumers.

“We have started with hydration biomarkers with products in the sports/fitness (Gx Sweat Patch) and industrial (Connected Hydration) sectors,” he added. “We’re validating and publishing new biosensing capabilities as part of a toolkit of offerings.”