SOME people tell their doctors that they are non-smokers in a bid to get cheaper life insurance. But an electronic nose could scupper such deception.
A team led by Paul Thomas at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, tweaked a commercially available e-nose so that it would detect the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the breath of a person who had smoked a cigarette. The e-nose uses an array of 32 sensors whose electrical resistance changes as different VOCs are detected. The resultant “smellprint” correctly identified 37 out of 39 volunteers as either smokers or non-smokers (Journal…
