Wearable sweat sensors play an important role for clinically meaningful information relative to health and disease of individuals. While sensors mainly rely on enzymes and antibodies to achieve specific quantification of stress biomarkers, the enzymes and antibodies can degrade, contributing to poor performance. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Umesha Mogera and a team of scientists in Biomedical Engineering at the Texas A&M University, Texas, U.S., introduced a wearable plasmonic-paper-based microfluidic system to analyze sweat loss, sweat rate and its constituent metabolites, continuously and simultaneously. The team developed plasmonic sensors based on label-free surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to provide a chemical fingerprint for analyte identification. They showed detection sensitivity and quantification of uric acid in sweat at physiological and pathological concentrations, and facilitated accurate quantification of the parameters of interest. They engineered the wearable plasmonic device to be soft, flexible and stretchable to cover the skin without inducing chemical or physical irritations.