Portable Breath Monitoring: A New Frontier in Personalized Health Care

Abstract

Smart systems that can monitor a patient's health, assist in remote assessment by a health care provider, and improve the patient's quality of life with limited intrusion and decreased costs is one aspect of a more interconnected world composed of distributed intelligent systems. Breath analysis techniques offer a potential revolution in health care diagnostics, especially if portable breath monitoring systems that can be used outside of a clinical setting can be developed. This article provides a brief overview of the motivation for breath monitoring, possible components of portable breath monitoring systems, and provides an example of this approach.

Electrically Transduced Gas Sensors Based on Semiconducting Metal Oxide Nanowires

“…Advances in sensing gaseous markers of SMO-NWs illustrate their ability for various applications, such as disease diagnosis by breath sensors, environmental protection, human safety monitoring, as well as novel flexible/wearable electronics. In the last two decades, extensive efforts and exciting scientific discoveries have been reported toward IoT-based projects [10][11][12][13]85,169,[279][280][281][282][283][284]. With a better understanding of the two fundamental processes of gas reception and electrical transduction, more high-performance and reliable SMO-NW sensors will be translated into actual production.…”

“…High-sensitive gas sensors are also required to detect air pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NO x ) and formaldehyde (HCHO), which are produced abundantly by industrial production and interior decoration. Medical studies have recently shown that breath sensors can be translated into clinical diagnostics by monitoring certain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) because they can act as biomarkers for some chronic diseases [12,13]. It is generally believed that the breath of lung cancer patients contains a large amount of benzene series (toluene, xylene, etc.)…”

Adsorption/Combustion-type Micro Gas Sensors: Typical VOC-sensing Properties and Material-design Approach for Highly Sensitive and Selective VOC Detection

“…On the basis of these situations, gas sensors are one of the promising candidates to detect these VOCs sensitively and selectively. 6 A great deal of effort has been put into developing various types of VOC sensors (semiconductor gas sensors, [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] solidelectrolyte gas sensors, [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] and others [24][25][26][27] ). Most of them are generally operated under static conditions at constant temperature.…”