Breath Sensors for Diabetes

"Sensor4Diabetes" Project Details

Traditionally, monitoring the level of blood glucose is performed to diagnose diabetes via invasive and painful techniques. In recent years, minimally invasive glucose sensing mechanisms such as continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices have been developed to alert an individual before they begin experiencing low or high level of blood glucose. The sensors in the CGM system are implanted underneath the skin and require frequent calibration, which need to be replaced frequently. This operation is highly inconvenient and this device is very expensive. Therefore, there is a high demand for non-invasive, affordable and rapid detection devices for continuous monitoring of diabetes, which is searched by the researchers worldwide. Early and affordable diabetes detection technology for monitoring and management of diabetes will help hundreds of thousands people to reduce serious health problems and life threatening side effects. Worldwide governments are struggling to cover the cost of diabetes care.

In the recent years, breath analysis is becoming viable for detecting metabolic disorders due to their easy, affordable and non-invasivetesting procedure. Normally, a healthy breath consists of H2O, O2 N2, CO2 and traces of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which is also known as “breath marker”. Due to metabolic disorder an unhealthy breath contains increased amount of some markers. Research has shown that diabetes, kidney diseases, lungs inflammation, airway inflammations, bacterial infection and liver diseases can be detected by breath analysis.

Presence of higher amount of certain VOCs in the exhaled breath has strong correlations to diabetes. However, while the detection of those VOCs can be linked to diabetes, currently there is no cheap, real-time, mobile and reliable sensor to diagnose diabetes from human breath.

Gas sensors composed of semiconducting metal oxides (SMOs) are an attractive solution for detecting diabetes from exhaled breath. Such sensors are simple, provide high miniaturization, consume low power and can be produced in mass scale at lower cost. Gas sensors based on both impedometric and photonic principles is expected to have better performance in terms of sensitivity and lower limit of detection which is particularly required for diabetic breath detection.

Usage of one dimensional (1D) SMO nanostructures allows high-surface-to-volume ratio for gas adsorption/desorption resulting in high response towards target gases. Beside this, presence of different metallic and ceramic nanoparticles on the surface of 1D SMOs results in faster catalytic decomposition of breath markers and deposition of receptor layers resulting in faster response time by chemical sensitization process such as, lowering the oxidation energy, increasing the catalytic surface area and catalytic activation of gas molecules.

This research project aims to develop novel hybrid breath analyzing sensor based on semiconducting one dimensional metal oxide nanostructures to diagnose diabetes by employing both impedometric and photonic methods. The main drive of the breath sensor will be to provide miniaturize, continuous, real-time, non-invasive and mobile device for detection and monitoring of diabetes at a lower cost.