The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to offer a low cost, personal device to fight obesity and its related chronic associated conditions by tracking metabolic rate. This is particularly important as modern society as a whole adopts a sedentary lifestyle. There is clear correlation between overweight and increased risks of many diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancers, metabolic syndrome and high blood pressure, and over 140 million people in the US alone are overweight or obese.
The proposed project tackles this challenge by providing a tool that can track metabolic rate (to determine energy used and amount of food required), anaerobic threshold, and peak oxygen consumption rate (to optimize amount and types of activities). Such a tool has not been available until now due to multiple technical challenges that require sensitive and miniaturized sensors for detection of carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations in breath with sub-second resolution and <1% accuracy, and would also require measurement of breath flow rate over a wide dynamic range under minimal flow resistance. To address these challenges, first, chemical sensors based on a hierarchical sensing material approach will be developed. This approach organizes sensing materials at different length scales, from nm to mm, into hierarchical structures to achieve fast and selective detection of the analytes. Second, to measure breath flow rate, a novel low-cost, power-free acoustic sensor will be developed, which converts breath into an acoustic signal that can be detected and analyzed with the built-in microphone of a cell phone. Finally, a prototype device will be calibrated and validation to demonstrate its functionality against expensive, bulky stand-alone gold standard reference methods.
