Wearable Sweat Test Simplifies Cystic Fibrosis Diagnosis

Diagnosis depends on sweat chloride testing that is typically limited to accredited centers and specialized laboratories. Travel, scheduling, and technical requirements can delay confirmation and initiation of therapy. To help address this challenge, researchers have developed wearable stickers that simplify diagnostic sweat testing for cystic fibrosis.

The technology, called CF SWIFT, was created by Northwestern University’s Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics in close collaboration with the cystic fibrosis center at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The stickers are small, flexible, and gentle on babies’ skin. They are designed to lower cost and complexity by removing the need for specialized equipment and technical expertise.

The system uses two sequential stickers at the same skin site. The first stimulates sweat production with a chemical and a small button battery. The second collects the sweat for analysis, and a smartphone application quantifies chloride concentration by measuring changes in color density from an image of the sticker. The full procedure takes less than one hour.

In a study published in npj Digital Medicine on July 28, 2026, investigators evaluated the stickers against the standard laboratory sweat test. The study enrolled 55 participants, including three healthy volunteers and 52 people with cystic fibrosis or cystic fibrosis–related conditions, from infancy through 21 years of age. Each participant underwent both conventional testing and the sticker-based method, which showed a high correlation between results and supported the device’s diagnostic accuracy.

The approach may expand access to timely testing for families who live far from accredited centers or in lower income countries where laboratory resources are limited. Before clinical rollout, the team plans multicenter validation in younger infants, when most U.S. sweat tests are performed, and will seek clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“This latest paper is a real advance over our previous report in Science Translational Medicine, which showed that sweat chloride could be accurately measured on a sticker after sweat stimulation using current technology. The new "CF SWIFT" device is a complete self-contained system, including the soft stimulator unit, with a much larger population of children studied and proof of clinical accuracy in measuring chloride,” said John Rogers, co-senior author on the study.

“We found a high correlation in the results between the two methods, which demonstrates that the new technology reliably reflects sweat chloride measurements used for diagnosis of CF. Before these sweat testing stickers become clinically available, however, we need to validate our findings in a multicenter study with younger infants, since most sweat tests in the U.S. are performed in the first weeks of life. Of course, FDA approval will be necessary for clinical use,” said Susanna McColley, MD, CF expert at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Related Links
Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago 
Northwestern University’s Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics