Health status monitoring by discrimination of exhaled breath with an electronic nose

Abstract

In an aging society, people unprecedentedly spend more attention to routine assessment of their health status. Besides self-check and doctor's examination, there are also biomedical devices capable of monitoring and indicating the status of human health. In this paper, we proposed an electronic nose system that has been developed to have the ability to detect odor from human breath in order to indicate the health status of its owner. Metal-porphyrins (MPs)/SWNT-COOH and polymer/SWNT-COOH nanocomposites sensors were used as the array of chemical gas sensors inside the electronic nose system. These sensing materials are sensitive to odor molecules presented in the exhaled breath. The constructed device consumes low power and can be operated at room temperature. A preliminary experiment was conducted on the sample group consisting of cancer patients and healthy volunteers to distinguish their health status indicating diseases. It was found that the e-nose can detect exhaled breath odors and discriminate the pattern of breath odor of each person. This will be useful in discriminating one's breath odor and identifying his health status. This device could help reduce the risks of getting infected from any disease beforehand. ©2012 IEEE.