Smart masks are here! Make breathing more "smart"

Author Li Chuanfu

Recently, scientists published a result in the journal Science, which makes masks no longer just a protective tool, but a high-tech health monitoring device. This technology not only allows us to have a deeper understanding of breathing, but also provides a new way for the early diagnosis, monitoring and management of respiratory and metabolic diseases.

Breathing is one of the most basic and complex activities of life. With every breath, we are not only exchanging oxygen, but also releasing biological information that is closely related to our health status. For example, the breath of diabetics often contains a special "bad apple" smell, which is caused by the high content of exhaled acetone. In addition, respiratory infectious diseases such as COVID-19 can also be transmitted through exhaled aerosols. However, due to the fluidity of gaseous breath, the sampling and detection of chemical molecules in breath has always been a technical challenge.

Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) is a liquid formed when breath condenses. It contains a wealth of biomarkers, such as acetone, ammonia, and leukotrienes, which can reveal a person's health status. However, traditional EBC collection methods have many limitations, such as short cooling time, large temperature changes, high power consumption, and weight and size restrictions, which limit their wearable applications.

Professor Gao Wei's team at the California Institute of Technology proposed a flexible microfluidic device integrated into an everyday mask - EBCare. This smart mask can continuously condense exhaled moisture, automatically capture and refresh EBC, and perform real-time, in-situ multiple analysis of biomarkers. The design of EBCare is based on a new passive micro-continuous cooling strategy, which can achieve a continuous cooling effect of at least 7 hours in indoor and outdoor environments. In addition, EBCare also uses the principle of bionics to imitate the mechanism of liquid flow in plants to achieve stable and continuous flow of EBC.

Smart mask design Source: Science magazine

EBCare's electrochemical sensor array is able to analyze multiple biomarkers in EBC with high selectivity and sensitivity. These sensor patches can be mass-produced at low cost through laser cutting or inkjet printing, making EBCare an affordable health monitoring tool. Through EBCare, we can capture and analyze the user's respiratory and metabolic data in real time, providing continuous health monitoring for daily life and disease management.

The application prospects of EBCare are very broad. It can not only promote the research and early diagnosis of respiratory diseases, metabolic diseases and infectious diseases, but also play an important role in the fields of preventive medicine and personal precision medicine. With the continuous development and improvement of this technology, we have reason to believe that EBCare will become an important technical support for improving the health level of the population.