Self-monitoring the breath for the prevention of cardio-metabolic risk

Breath analysis techniques offer a potential revolution in health care diagnostics because of their un-obtrusiveness and their inherent safety. However, while standard instrumentation such as mass spectrometers use laboratory settings to provide a correlation between exhaled substances and physical conditions, to fully realize the potential of breath analysis as a self-monitoring tool, its application must take place also in the clinics and at home and not only in a laboratory. This basic requirement has stimulated the necessity to develop cheap, portable, real time, easy-to-use devices for reliable breath tests and analysis. In this paper, we present the design of a portable breath analyzer, able to sense a set of breath volatile organic compounds (VOCs), to perform a processing of the data collected and to generate an output easily interpreted both by physicians and patients.