Iranian researchers at Islamic Azad University have designed a device that can detect and diagnose digestive system diseases by sniffing people’s breath.
The ‘electrical nose’ is modeled after Iranian scientist Avicenna’s concept, who would smell patients’ breath when he could not diagnose their ailment. “This is while most diagnostic methods today such as colonoscopy and endoscopy are aggressive and could even cause more health problems,” said Abolfazl Khosravi, one of the researchers in the project. The device can track the root cause of a particular smell in the breath by detecting the type of bacteria that has caused it. The device was first presented as an idea in a scientific article at the First International Conference of Biomedical Engineering and Telemedicine at Tehran’s Amirkabir University of Technology in 2013.
“A research institute affiliated to NASA in the US has produced a model after we proposed our design, while giving us credit for the original idea,” Khosravi said.
