The wize sniffer knows what you did: prevent cardio-metabolic risk by analyzing your breath

Its un-obtrusiveness and its inherent safety make breath analysis a very promising technique in health-care diagnostics. On one hand, it enables the monitoring of biochemical processes: the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the metabolic processes are generated within the body, travel via the blood, participate to the alveolar exchanges and appear in exhaled breath; on the other hand, breath is easily and non-invasively accessible. Nevertheless, despite its great potential, breath analysis is not widely used in clinical practice: the high costs for standard analytical instrumentation (i.e., gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer), the need for specialized personnel able to read the results and the lack of standardized protocols to collect breath samples, set limits to its exploitation. Here, we describe the Wize Sniffer (WS), a portable device based on low cost technology, able to collect and analyze in real time the composition of the breath. In particular, by means of the WS, the user can evaluate his/her own cardio-metabolic risk score by self-monitoring the composition of the breath. Indeed, the presented device is able to detect, in real time, all those VOCs related to the noxious habits for cardio-metabolic risk. Nonetheless, the modular configuration of the WS, makes it usable also for other applications by changing the type of the gas sensors according to the molecules to be detected.