Towards an Accessible, Noninvasive Micronutrient Status Assessment Method: A Comprehensive Review of Existing Techniques

TL;DR

This review highlights the need for accessible, noninvasive techniques for micronutrient assessment, criticizing current methods for their invasiveness and limited clinical relevance, and suggests future directions for innovation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive synthesis of existing techniques and identifies gaps, emphasizing the importance of developing clinically relevant, noninvasive assessment methods for micronutrients.

Findings

Current methods are invasive and lack clinical relevance.

There is limited overlap between biofluid and physiological assessment approaches.

Future opportunities include developing accessible, holistic assessment systems.

Abstract

Nutrients are critical to the functioning of the human body and their imbalance can result in detrimental health concerns. The majority of nutritional literature focuses on macronutrients, often ignoring the more critical nuances of micronutrient balance, which require more precise regulation. Currently, micronutrient status is routinely assessed via complex methods that are arduous for both the patient and the clinician. To address the global burden of micronutrient malnutrition, innovations in assessment must be accessible and noninvasive. In support of this task, this article synthesizes useful background information on micronutrients themselves, reviews the state of biofluid and physiological analyses for their assessment, and presents actionable opportunities to push the field forward. By taking a unique, clinical perspective that is absent from technological research on the topic, we find that the state of the art suffers from limited clinical relevance, a lack of overlap between biofluid and physiological approaches, and highly invasive and inaccessible solutions. Future work has the opportunity to maximize the impact of a novel assessment method by incorporating clinical relevance, the holistic nature of micronutrition, and prioritizing accessible and noninvasive systems.