HEALTHMONITOR, a compact device that diagnoses the presence of coronavirus in humans through exhalation, has been developed by a group of scientists.
The Institute of Automation and Electrometry of the SB RAS, together with the Novosibirsk company Scientificcoin, have developed the HEALTHMONITOR, a compact device that diagnoses the presence of coronavirus in humans.
The HEALTHMONITOR gas analyzers allow the exhalation to detect diseases of the respiratory system, some of the gastrointestinal tract, to diagnose diabetes and COVID-19. In the case of coronavirus, the accuracy of the analysis is 90–95% and varies depending on the strain. To do this, you just need to breathe into the tube. The result is given almost instantly.
Aside Covid, the other experiments
In addition, scientists from the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography SB RAS conducted experiments to determine pneumonia, fibrosis, cancer, asthma at an early stage.
Most often, to diagnose the disease by exhalation, mass spectrometers are used – bulky devices that operate at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. However, they cannot be used for full screening.
How the gas analyzer works
To do this, it is necessary to transport the patient to the apparatus or collect expiratory samples in special bags, the material of which can affect the percentage accuracy of the diagnosis. The innovative gas analyzer works on the basis of the optical emission spectrometry method, for this a special neural network has been developed.
“We do not apply classical spectral analysis to directly classify spectra, as the biomarkers of COVID-19 have not yet been fully understood. To date, more than five of them have been identified, while the dependence is nonlinear. Therefore, only a neural network can handle the most accurate diagnostics,” explained Alexander Vladimirovich Kugaevskikh, a researcher at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the SB RAS, Candidate of Technical Sciences.
HEALTHMONITOR installed in airports, malls
As part of testing, this device has already been installed in airports and some shopping centers. Now, for the purposes of medical certification, at the end of January 2022, several gas analyzers will be put into operation in a number of Moscow clinics.
In addition, the possibility of using the device in sports medicine and fitness centers is of great interest today – with the necessary settings, the gas analyzer will be able to determine the effectiveness of training or the presence of doping in the human body.
“The main difficulty is to collect a large reliable sample with a diagnosis. All studies devoted to diagnostics by exhalation were based on samples of 20-25 people. Our work on the diagnosis of COVID-19 is based on more than 300 guaranteed confirmed diagnoses,” said Alexander Kugaevskikh.
This report was first posted by SBRAS.
