Your breath may soon be the only thing you need to decode your health symptoms!

(Image for representational purposes only)

New Delhi: Soon, you may not have to wait those painful hours or days for your health test results to come out, in order to know your diagnosis.

A low-cost, disposable sensor will reveal your problem to you just by monitoring your breath, by detecting disease markers. This will not only save your time, but will also give you an early warning sign in case a doctor is required.

Scientists developed the small-sized device using a thin square of an organic plastic.

"We developed this method to directly print tiny pores into the device itself so we can expose these highly reactive sites. By doing so, we increased the reactivity by ten times and can sense down to one part per billion," said Ying Diao, professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US.

"We want to hand out a cheap sensor chip to patients so they can use it and throw it away," Diao said.

Researchers, including those from Purdue University in the US, focused on ammonia as a marker for kidney failure.

Monitoring the change in ammonia concentration could give a patient an early warning sign to call their doctor for a kidney function test, researchers said.

Researchers chose a material that is highly reactive to ammonia but not to other compounds in breath.

However, by changing the composition of the sensor, they created devices that tuned to other compounds.

For example, the researchers created an ultrasensitive environmental monitor for formaldehyde, a common indoor pollutant in new or refurbished buildings.

"We would like to be able to detect multiple compounds at once, like a chemical fingerprint. It is useful because in disease conditions, multiple markers will usually change concentration at once," Diao said.

"By mapping out the chemical fingerprints and how they change, we can more accurately point to signs of potential health issues," she added.

The study was published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

(With PTI inputs)