SICK TEST: SNIFF A SOLDIER’S BREATH

Commanders want to know when their sol­diers are sick or tired. But, so far, there’s no good, quick, objec­tive test to fig­ure out how they’re doing.
Pentagon-​​funded researchers think they may have found the answer, by chem­i­cally “sniff­ing” a soldier’s breath.
“Human breath con­tains a treasure-​​trove of meta­bolic data, which has the poten­tial to pro­vide real time infor­ma­tion rep­re­sent­ing an individual’s base­line health sta­tus,” notes a recent Defense Department Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award, given out to the University of Tennessee.
Lung health, ulcers, expo­sure to aller­gens or chem­i­cal tox­ins — even stress can be picked up by sort­ing through the mol­e­cules we exhale, stud­ies indi­cate.
Johns Hopkins sci­en­tists are look­ing to build sen­sors that can instantly detect these warn­ing signs, by com­bin­ing “tun­able, mid-​​wave IR [infrared] semi­con­duc­tor laser tech­nol­ogy and cavity-​​enhanced spec­troscopy.“
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, on the other hand, think they can do the same job with a portable ver­sion of their “Electronic Nose Microsensor,” which looks for the elec­tri­cal sig­na­ture of cer­tain mol­e­cules in a gas. Altogether, five con­tracts were handed out recently by the Pentagon for the breath-​​o-​​meters.
Not to be out­done, University of Pennsylvania sci­en­tists want to build for the Pentagon a machine that can auto­mat­i­cally spot when a sol­dier gets sleepy, “captur[ing] the early signs of fatigue such as lack of con­cen­tra­tion, yawn­ing, changes in voice char­ac­ter­is­tics, etc.” The idea is to use smart cam­eras and eye-​​safe laser scan­ners that can tell when a G.I. yawns or blinks. It’s an approach, based on a model which has “proven to be extremely pow­er­ful in char­ac­ter­iz­ing human speaker and bird voice char­ac­ter­is­tics,” the Pentagon STTR award says.

January 25th, 2005 | Medic! | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.