Many of us have heard the claims that dogs – with their acute sense of smell – have “sniffed out” disease in their owners. So, what if a technology could be developed that allowed humans the same type of “superpower”?
In fact, such a technology is not very far-fetched at all. Dr. Andrew Koehl, a researcher who originally started to develop the sensor-based technology at the University of Cambridge and has since continued to develop it at Owlstone Nanotech, has invented a microchip spectrometer technology that can detect chemicals in the air.
It’s about a size of a dime and it uses sensing technology to create a spectrum of what chemicals are in the air. From there, the microchip can identify the unique make-up of each chemical. The sensor is then calibrated to a certain level, triggering an alarm to alert users when chemicals exist in larger-than-normal quantities.
Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensors have been successfully utilized in a range of electronic nose systems
[1]. A QCM sensor consists of a quartz crystal, coated with an analyte-sensitive polymer. The analyte is adsorbed on contact onto the polymer coating’s surface, increasing the mass of the QCM sensor and hence resulting in a change in resonant frequency. A QCM sensor coated with a given polymer is multi-specific, i.e. it responds to multiple analytes, hence QCM-based electronic nose systems make use of an array of sensors, each using a distinct sensor coating.
Arange of different interface circuit designs has been used with QCM sensors. Some use the QCM as the resonant element in a digital logic-gate based oscillator circuit, the resulting oscillation frequency being measured by either a digital frequency counter implemented in a Field-Programmable Gate-Array (FPGA) or a frequency-to-voltage converter driving an analog-to-digital PC data acquisition card .
For more details visit: http://www.owlstonenanotech.com/
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