Your breathing soon may be the only thing to decode health symptoms

In the near future, it is likely that you will not have to wait many hours or days of pain to get your health test results using a breath control sensor.

A low-cost disposable sensor will reveal your health problems by monitoring the breath, thereby detecting signs of disease. This will not only save your time, but also give you an early warning sign in case the doctor asks.

Scientists have developed small devices using a thin square made of organic plastic.

Ying Diao, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the United States, said: " We have developed this device and printed signs and bio-coding on the device so that we can expose positions. strong reaction to disease 10 times faster, the ability to sense, diagnose the disease reached 1 part 1 billion '.

" We want to give a cheap sensor chip to patients so they can use it and throw it away later, " Diao said.

Indian researchers, including researchers from Purdue University in the US, have focused on examining ammonia in the breath as a diagnostic marker for kidney failure.

Monitoring changes in ammonia levels may give patients an early warning sign so they call their doctor to check their kidney function promptly, the researchers said.

In addition, they chose a substance that was highly reactive to ammonia implanted in the device but it did not react with other compounds in the breath.

However, by changing the composition of substances in the sensor, they hope to adjust the device to work well with other substances in the breath.

For example, researchers have created a super-powered environmental monitoring device that reacts with formaldehyde, a common indoor pollutant found in new or refurbished buildings.

Diao said: " We want this sensor to detect many compounds at the same time, like a chemical fingerprint, very useful because under conditions of disease, many signs will change the concentration immediately. immediately very unstable " .

She added: " By mapping chemical fingerprints and how they change, we can get this sensor to show more accurately the signs of potential health problems . "

This research has just been published in Advanced Materialsal Materials.