Hydration strategy
Hydration strategy and management during a workout is difficult for athletes, who don’t have a way of monitoring their hydration status. Sweat rates can vary significantly from individual to individual, making it difficult to gauge how much fluid needs to be replaced.
Sweating is a natural response to the body’s need for water. Sweating rates vary greatly from person to person based on a variety of factors, including gender, weather, body mass, age, and fitness level. This makes it difficult to determine how much fluid needs to be replaced.
The lack of a consistent, reliable hydration management system can lead people to rely on difficult, unfeasible, or unreliable hydration methods.
A blood or urine hydration test provides valuable information about hydration status, but it isn’t feasible for athletes to get real-time and actionable data.
A visual check of urine color is a simple and common test for hydration status, but it is often unreliable and latent in its indication.
However, it is possible to manage hydration by calculating the athlete’s sweat rate. This can be done by weighing one’s self nude before and after the activity, calculating fluid loss via the change in body weight, accounting for all fluids consumed during the activity, and converting the difference in weight to the corresponding volume of fluid. Although this method can be somewhat accurate (and considered one of the gold standards for hydration), it is not practical in real-time scenarios, and it does not take into account the electrolyte balance of the athlete.
The goal for hDrop is to tackle this problem by providing athletes with real-time hydration data, which includes sweat rate and electrolyte losses sensor technology, together with a temperature sensor to help manage hydration.