NASA comes up with COVID-19 infection detector that's out of this world – E-Nose built from space station gear
- Reference: 1619503507
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/04/27/nasa_enose_covid19/
- Source link:
The team working on the project were awarded $3.8m by the US Department of Health and Human Services to modify the sensor. Instead of alerting astronauts to toxic gases, such as mercury vapor and formaldehyde, in space, the E-Nose will look out for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in human breath generated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
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“There are many VOCs in the breath, and we are looking for the VOCs that either are new to the healthy human breath or changed in quantity due to the virus,” Jing Li, the inventor of E-Nose and a principal investigator and senior scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, told The Register on Monday.
The VOCs produced by the COVID-19 coronavirus act as biomarkers. “After we identify the biomarkers, we can tune our sensors to detect them,” she explained.
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The E-Nose COVID sniffer ... Source: NASA/Ames Research Center/Dominic Hart. Click to enlarge.
Finding these biomarkers, however, isn’t straightforward. The team hopes machine-learning algorithms will help automatically find these biomarkers by identifying abnormalities in breath samples taken from patients infected with COVID-19. Data points are collected by getting patients to breathe into the E-Nose device, with the data transferred by Bluetooth to an app for diagnostics.
“The E-Nose algorithm will look at the patterns of the sensor array response to the human breath and then perform a pattern recognition to differentiate the healthy group with COVID-19 positive group,” Li said.
We admire your MOXIE, Earthlings: Perseverance rover gizmo produces oxygen for first time on Mars [4]READ MORE
“When the patient comes in for a COVID test, the E-Nose device will measure the sensor array response to this human’s breath and compare the pattern measured to the healthy control pattern or COVID-19 positive pattern stored in the app for similarity. It will identify the patient as COVID-19 positive when the sensor array response pattern matches the same COVID-19 positive pattern stored in the app,” she told us.
The project is still in its early stages; the researchers are testing out various machine-learning algorithms to discover and detect biomarkers in human breath. Li and her colleagues will also have to conduct clinical trials, too. They hope that the E-Nose will be sensitive enough to be used in public places, such as grocery stores and restaurants.
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“E-Nose could help mitigate community spread of the virus in a manner similar to how temperature checks are used to screen individuals before entering shared indoor spaces,” NASA [6]said . ®
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[6] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-ames-astrogram-april-2021
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
So they are spending lots of money and effort to try to reproduce what can be done far easier and cheaper using dogs?
NIH syndrome?
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03149-9
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03149-9
BBBZZZTTT WRONG!
Complete fail.
Manufacturing beats breeding & training.
Once you come up with a way of mechanising something you can scale up kit as quickly as you can get the raw materials and equipment to make it.
Breeding & training a new sniffer dog takes over a year and if similar to guide dogs has a high washout rate.
Unless you are suggesting mass scale puppy farms and industrialised training? That would go down well with the public.
Its one of the reasons we are driving cars rather than still riding horses. That and the vast quantities of poop. Which come to think of it is an issue with this idea too.:D
Re: BBBZZZTTT WRONG!
How about genetically sensitised canaries then?
They poo a lot less, eat less and wouldn't need to be trained. You just need a few in reserve in case one gets breathed on by an infected individual.
Possible false positives?
I hate to argue with NASA, but to avoid false positives, they'll have to ensure that the VOCs signifying COVID are unique to it, and that's going to be hard considering the number of possible generators of the typical VOC mixture. Trials will have to be massive, not only numerically, but across the spectrum of influential factors. And as far as use in open spaces goes - if they mean "on the street" - test subject specificity is likely to be a hard nut to crack in practice. The greater the sensitivity the harder it will be to ensure.
NASA is full of it, as usual
"... the E-Nose will look out for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in human breath generated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus."
Maaaan! Things can be so simple. Dhu!
Deployment?
How do they plan to deploy this in shops and offices etc?
Will entrants need to queue up to blow into a device or will it just test the air at an entry only door?
If it does detect an offending soup of VOCs, then what, sirens going off and all the doors and shutters crashing shut so that the healthy and infected are locked in together?
The idea doesn't seem to have been thought through very well.
Re: Deployment?
If blowing into a device - will it be self cleaning before the next subject blows?
Re: Deployment?
Presumably it will have a disposable tube that you blow in to.
That's how the air flow measurer works in asthma checkups.
Re: Deployment?
> The idea doesn't seem to have been thought through very well.
You're a hard one to please aren't you? They haven't even built it yet, let alone tested it, and already you're saying it's a poor idea because there might be issues with people management. Lucky you weren't around when they invented the car, presumably it would have been a poor idea because you'd never find a parking space.
C.f. "Pinprick Blood Test Touted as Game Changer Falls Flat on News of Inaccurate Results" (April, 2020)
E-Nose you know
I hope that part of the $3.8 million goes to creating a new name for the device.
The floor is yours commentards.
Fake News...
This is clearly fake.
My local cafe has one of these and it dispenses brown sauce!
"the researchers are testing out various machine-learning algorithms"
Because obviously these days only machine learning can possibly do the job properly.
Actually testing stuff yourselves in a lab is soo last millennium. No, let's test a bunch of ML algorithms we don't know how they work and, when we find one that gives us the results we want, we'll use that.
Here it comes...
... I'm waiting for the inevitable legal battle with Apple when they a) try and patent the iNose or b) try to claim that they patented the naming convention of prefixing the name of an item with a single letter...
Re: Here it comes...
Maybe better to name it iSmell.
What could possibly go wrong?
E-Nose will be sensitive enough to be used in public places...
Yes, let's fill our public spaces with all the detectors we can envisage. What could possibly go wrong?
Citizen, Over here! You temperature seems high. Your medical papers please. Come on, I'm busy. Now please.
We detect an unusual chemical signature on your breath. Do you have authorization to be in here? When did you last renew your permit to be away from your home?
I want all your contacts details - refusal will be considered a breach of public safety regulations and will count against your citizenship score.