Kim Kardashian claims she can smell a person's mouth and tell if they have a cavity, but a new smartphone add-on is being produced that could out-sniff her sniffer. The SNIFFPHONE will be able to detect life-threatening diseases with a breath screening, according to Relax News.
The gadget that will team up with your smartphone is being developed by a group of researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and is funded by a grant from the European Commission.
"It will be made tinier and cheaper than disease detection solutions currently, consume little power, and most importantly, it will enable immediate and early diagnosis that is both accurate and non-invasive," said consortium head Professor Hossam Haick.
When you exhale into the SNIFFPHONE device, micro-sensors and nano-sensors will analyze before sending the processed data to your smartphone for diagnosis. SNIFFPHONE is said to detect diseases and also tell you if you are likely to contract a disease (and help you avoid it).
According to RT (TV-Novosti), SNIFFPHONE can tell you if you have lung cancer - months before any other test could. The technology has been in development since 2006, but Haick is making it more portable with the hopes that poor or remote areas could benefit from quick health screenings.
"Currently, the patient arrives for diagnosis when the symptoms of the sickness have already begun to appear," Haick said. "Months pass before a real analysis in completed. And the process requires complicated and expensive equipment such as CT and mammography imaging devices. Each machine costs millions of dollars, and ends up delivering rough, inaccurate results."
NaNose is the current commercialized stationary breathalyzer for disease and it is 90 percent accurate, according to RT.
A "breathprint" can be used to detect heart failure, according to a 2012 study published by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. A breath test was developed in 2013 that could detect a person's susceptibility to gain weight, based on the amount of methane and hydrogen in an exhalation. That paper was published by the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
