On-cloth wearable E-nose for monitoring and discrimination of body odor signature

Abstract

In this paper, we have developed a wearable electronic nose (e-nose) embedded on cloth for detecting the body odor of wearer, aiming to be a self-monitoring healthcare consumer electronics. This 'smelling shirt' consists of eight on-fabric chemical gas sensors based on polymer/functionalized-SWCNTs simply fabricated by embroidering and drop coating process. Sew-able electronic modules based on LilyPad Arduino together with wireless ZigBee module were used for data acquisition and communication. The performance of the sensors has been tested by a selected set of volatile organic compounds as presented in the body odor, such as dodecane, 2-ethylhexanol, butyric acid, 6-Methyl-5-heptenone, nonanal and water. Discrimination of individual health status and analysis of the odor-print (or smell-print) of specific persons were confirmed by principal component analysis (PCA), which was found to be able to track change in the human body odor, thereby showing its potential to be applied for real-time point-of-care health monitoring. © 2014 IEEE.