Health is a topic of great interest and many people take care of themselves by performing various exercises or by eating healthy foods. However, despite such efforts, they still have chances of getting diseases, which is because of a lack of precise understanding about their own health condition or as to how to deal with it due to the limitations of existing devices in reliability, availability and simplicity. When considering the daily care of individuals' health, an accurate, affordable and easy way of monitoring health should be offered to individuals. Therefore, we propose a new health monitoring system for smartphones based on the technique of chemical analysis of the breath, which is highly reliable, inexpensive and small enough to be portable.
Chemical analysis of the breath has attracted much attention as an effective approach to investigating the health condition and a number of promising results have indicated its promising potential of detecting diseases. This is based on the fact that people with cancer, asthma and many other diseases carry trace amounts of distinctive biomarkers in their breath. Precise detection of these markers thus allows you to know your health condition or diagnose such diseases in their early stages noninvasively and before symptoms arise.
To realize the concept, we employed Real Time Chemical Detection (RTCD) technology, which is a real-time detection and analysis of chemical substances using a highly sensitive, inexpensive and small olfaction processor, and developed a health monitoring system for smartphones named ICARE. We have selected a smartphone as a part of the system because talking on the phone is a part of our daily life, where you are breathing out, and the market of smartphones is growing rapidly, which will eventually expand market share of the system.
This system can be used almost anytime, anywhere for anyone as long as it can detect chemical substances in the breath and helps you maintain your health or notice diseases in their early stages readily, which will lead to an increase in your quality of life (QOL) and a decrease in the cost of treatment because you may not need to take as much medicine as the patients with late-stage diseases.
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