Your sweat could tell you when to make a baby - and more

YOU ARE ovulating. You are dehydrated. Your cholesterol is too high. Or too low. You are depressed, stressed or your muscles are cramping. Time to get off the golf course and get the heart checked. Or keep playing, you are fine.

A Cincinnati start-up is working on advanced wristbands, headbands and skin patches that will read markers and diagnose your health risks - or opportunities - from the sweat your body secretes.

"This is the hard-science end of wearables," said Robert Beech, chairman and co-founder of Eccrine Systems.

Fitness wearables such as Fitbit and Jawbone measure heart rate, steps, sleep and a few other metrics. The wearable market and the technology opportunities are vast.

Beech and Eccrine want to turn wearables into mini-laboratories like the kind that slice and dice your blood samples and tell you things such as whether you are at risk of prostate cancer or what your Vitamin D level is.

Beech said, "The goal is not to have to stick needles and catheters into people. In the context of daily life, work, sleep, play, the goal is to be to have a window into the current physiological status of the wearer."

Eccrine's technology will grab sweat as soon as it is secreted and gush a pile of data about your biochemical status to your smartphone or a cloud-based analytical system that can search biomarkers that can alert the wearer to potential maladies.

Beech said Eccrine is 18 months from producing its first wearable, either the wristband, headband or skin patch.