Abstract
This paper presents sensor nanotechnologies that can be used for the skin-based gas “smelling” of disease. Skin testing may provide rapid and reliable results, using specific “fingerprints” or unique patterns for a variety of diseases and conditions. These can include metabolic diseases, such as diabetes and cholesterol-induced heart disease; neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s; quality of life conditions, such as obesity and sleep apnea; pulmonary diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; gastrointestinal tract diseases, such as irritable bowel syndrome and colitis; cancers, such as breast, lung, pancreatic, and colon cancers; infectious diseases, such as the flu and COVID-19; as well as diseases commonly found in ICU patients, such as urinary tract infections, pneumonia, and infections of the blood stream. Focusing on the most common gaseous biomarkers in breath and skin, which is nitric oxide and carbon monoxide, and certain abundant volatile organic compounds (acetone, isoprene, ammonia, alcohols, sulfides), it is argued here that effective discrimination between the diseases mentioned above is possible, by capturing the relative sensor output signals from the detection of each of these biomarkers and identifying the distinct breath print for each disease.
Highlights
Disease diagnosis based on the human body’s gaseous emissions can be traced back as far as Hippocrates of Cos, who lived between 460 BCE and 370 BCE and who is commonly known as humanity’s first physician
Despite evidence that analytes appearing in breath and ambiently coming out of the skin correlate with various diseases, breath and skin gas diagnostics is not common among modern physicians
Great barriers to widespread acceptance of breath and skin-emission sensing technologies, besides alcohol detection in the determination of intoxication, still exist, along the path of the professional adoption of these techniques and along the path of public trust of these techniques. Most notable among these barriers is the disagreement among health professionals on where to draw the line between healthy and ill in terms of gaseous metabolite biomarker readings, but efforts by professional organizations such as the American Thoracic Society and the European Respiratory Society to rigorously determine such guidelines are inspiring new efforts to develop user-friendly breath-monitoring devices for widespread public use [12]
Summary
Disease diagnosis based on the human body’s gaseous emissions can be traced back as far as Hippocrates of Cos, who lived between 460 BCE and 370 BCE and who is commonly known as humanity’s first physician. Despite evidence that analytes appearing in breath and ambiently coming out of the skin correlate with various diseases, breath and skin gas diagnostics is not common among modern physicians. It is possible to make individual sensors with established sensitivities for specific analytes that have been proven to scale with the severity of certain diseases Such quantitative measurements would allow not just binary readings such as “ill” versus “well”, but would allow indirect measurement of biologically significant quantities such as blood sugar. Researchers have collected gases emitted from human skin from areas such as the arms, hands, and fingers and have reported their relative values as measured using gas chromatography and/or mass spectrometry [10,11] Most correlate with their relative concentrations in breath and blood. These are just a few of the added advantages to developing skin gas detectors
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