Breath Analysis: An Approach for Smart Diagnostics

This volume highlights the potentials as well as the limits and challenges of human breath analysis and describes the current efforts made to advance this promising technology from bench to bed. Human breath analysis is a young, interdisciplinary and innovative research field aiming to provide a smart and non-invasive diagnostic tool, which can be used for screening, detecting and monitoring of diseases or metabolic disorders. This book presents different approaches for breath analysis including real-time and offline mass spectrometry as well as optical and semiconductor gas sensing methods. Besides, the role of smart algorithms to improve the performance of those technologies and the importance of pulmonary function diagnostics for more reliable and meaningful breath analysis are highlighted. Finally, current application scenarios and future perspectives of breath analysis and pulmonary functioning tests are addressed.

The volume is useful for researchers, who are new in the field, to easily get an overview of the current status and the challenges present in human breath analysis. Topics from fundamental research over targeted sensor development and application scenarios are described. Thus, this volume covers all development stages providing support and inspiration for engineers, medical doctors and scientists from various fields.

Dr. Stefan Weigl received his master’s degree in engineering (M. Eng.) from the Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule (OTH) of Regensburg in Germany in 2016. In the course of his master thesis, he started his research on the photoacoustic gas sensing technique in 2015. He received his Doctorate of Natural Sciences (Dr. rer. nat.) in 2021 at the faculty of chemistry and pharmacy of the University of Regensburg. Within his PhD thesis, he investigated the applicability of UV LEDs and IR lasers for the photoacoustical detection of acetone in human breath exhale. Currently, Dr. Stefan Weigl is part of the photoacoustic team of the Sensorik-Applikationszentrum (SappZ), which is located at the Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule (OTH) of Regensburg and supervises the breath analysis research group.