Urine Odor Detection by Electronic Nose for Smart Toilet Application

The association of change in the pattern of volatile organic compounds released from the human body with a person's health has proved effective in screening and diagnosing diseases. And with smart devices getting integrated into our living environment, a smart toilet that could monitor the change in urine odor to indicate the health status through analysis of urine would be of great importance. For this reason, we have developed an electronic nose based on eight metal oxide gas sensors in this work to functional as a system that can analyze urine odor. To evaluate the performance of gas sensors, we have performed tests from three groups of urine obtained from healthy, diabetic and alcohol-drinking volunteers. Representatively, the highest sensing response was found to be demonstrated by the sensor TGS2603 and the lowest by MQ8. Overall, all the gas sensors have shown excellent sensitivity to the changes in the urine odor. The discrimination ability of the e-nose evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA) could successfully group and discriminate urine odors based on the volatile organic compounds presented in its head-space.