A Prototype of a Portable Gas Analyzer for Exhaled Acetone Detection

Abstract

The paper presents the development of a portable gas analyzer prototype for exhaled acetone detection, employing an application-suited gas sensor array and 3D printing technology. The device provides the functionality to monitor exhaled acetone levels, which could be used as a potential tool for non-invasive diabetes monitoring. The relationship between exhaled acetone concentrations and glucose in blood is confirmed in the literature, including research carried out by the authors. The design process is presented including a general consideration for the sensor array construction, which is the core for sensing gases, as well as requirements for the measurement chamber it is to be placed in. Moreover, the mechanical design of the 3D-printed housing is discussed to ensure the ergonomics of use as a hand-held device while keeping the hardware integrity. Also, the processing hardware is discussed to provide sufficient computing power to handle the stand-alone operation while being energy efficient, enabling long battery-powered operation. Finally, calibration and measurement, as well as the analyzer operation, are shown, validating the proposed class of exhaled acetone-detection capable meters.

Review—Non-Invasive Monitoring of Human Health by Exhaled Breath Analysis: A Comprehensive Review

“…The detection limit of the sensor was reported to be 10 ppm acetone in air. In another report Sorocki et al 270 reported on a prototype, portable breath analyzer for exhaled acetone detection, the target application being point of care detection of type-1 diabetes. In their report there were no discussion on the functional material.…”

Detection of lung cancer with electronic nose using a novel ensemble learning framework

“…Instead, VOCs may be present at different levels between healthy individuals and cancer patients. For example, several studies found that acetone is increased in the breath of lung cancer patients compared with the control group, suggesting that elevated acetone may be a potential biomarker for lung cancer [16,17]. However, it should be noted that increased exhaled acetone is related to several other diseases, including diabetes [18], alcoholic hepatitis [19], and heart failure [20].…”

GLAD Magnetron Sputtered Ultra-Thin Copper Oxide Films for Gas-Sensing Application

“…The gas-sensing setup was previously described in [51,52,56]. Briefly, the developed sensors (Figure 2a,b) with various copper oxides serve as the gas-sensitive layers, which were placed in the quartz-tube oven, and the target gas at various concentrations was introduced.…”

“…In this paper, the investigation provides results on copper oxides deposited by a commercially available glancing angle deposition system (most papers present only the investigation on homemade GLAD manipulators, which reduce the possibility of repeating the results) at various conditions. The deposited thin films were used as gas-sensitive layers for sub-ppm acetone detection, which is recognized to be a biomarker of diabetes present in the breath [51][52][53][54][55][56].…”