ELENA: A low-cost portable electronic nose for alcohol characterization

While detection of alcohols in trace quantities is useful in a variety of commercial, industrial, environmental and defense applications, it plays a very crucial role in biomedical applications. Concentration of alcohols of as low as 0.4% methanol in 40% ethanol in blood is considered to be lethal and can lead to serious health issues. Developing a low cost highly accurate and a portable device to detect alcohol concentrations has always remained a challenge. Modern day solutions either require sophisticated equipment or unable to estimate concentrations with high accuracy. This work focuses on determination of alcohols in different concentrations in trace quantities using an electronic nose technology — ELENA. It is a portable device which consists of an array of sensors inside a sensor chamber, with a pin hole inlet, whose output is connected to a data acquisition and pattern recognition system. The pattern recognition system utilizes a neural network to estimate the concentration of alcohol in the provided sample. The entire setup has been validated for sensitivity and specificity.