A low cost and portable device for home care breath sensing

Germanese D, Benassi A, D'Acunto M, Leone R, Magrini M, Paradisi P, Righi M, Salvetti O

Healthcare  Breath analysis  Portable device 

We here discuss the first implementation of Wize Sniffer 1.0 (WS1.0), a new portable electronic device for breath analysis in home care. WS1.0 is designed for the chemical analysis of a few substances in human breath. The device is still a prototype that is being developed in the framework of the Collaborative European Project SEMEOTICONS (SEMEiotic Oriented Technology for Individuals CardiOmetabolic risk self-assessmeNt and Self-monitoring1 ). WS1.0 is an hardware/software tool for the analysis of volatile organic compounds of human breath and should be able to provide useful information about the breathprint. Some of the measurable compounds are associated with cell metabolism, thus WS1.0 can give useful information about the state of health of an indi- vidual. WS1.0 can also give feedbacks about alcohol intake and smoking habit. The low cost and compactness of the device allows for a daily screening of the general state of health of an individual that, even if with- out a real diagnostic meaning, could represent a sort of pre-monitoring that could be used for an optimal selection of more sophisticated and standard medical analyses.