It has long been known that exhaled breath contains numerous chemical compounds that may signal metabolic changes in human and animal bodies, including diseases such as kidney failure and lung cancer.

 

Hippocrates of Cos coined medical terms (such as fetor hepaticus) that relate the odor of exhaled breath to a disease or medical condition. In the early 1980s, Linus Pauling advocated the concept of orthomolecular medicine a theory that relates the concentration of human fluids to state of health and started analyzing the chemical constituents of exhaled air using gas chromatography. Since then, it is known what it takes to ‘capture one's breath’: highly specific and sensitive gas analyzers.

 

Until now the lack of appropriate sensor technology has limited the widespread use of breath analysis as a non-invasive methodology for medical diagnostics.. Breath contains as many as 300 different gaseous species, and robust technologies would enable detection and discrimination of particular ‘disease-signaling’ gases from the complex odors of the breath. Selective gas analyzers that measure trace chemical concentrations in breath samples are currently available but they are either too expensive, bulky, or require large samples of collected exhaled breath.

 

Point-of-Care breath analysis offers a potential revolution in disease diagnosis and treatment guidance. In principle, each breath contains information regarding the internal state of a patient. Breath contains many relevant biomarkers which have the potential for replacing several existing medical (blood) tests, as well as enabling novel, more effective and more efficient diagnosis and treatment guidance methods, at home or in critical care. New sensor technologies enable and accelerate the unlocking of this huge potential.