A portable electronic nose (E-Nose) system based on PDA

The electronic nose (e-nose) has been used in food investigation and quality controls in industry. Recently it finds its applications in medical diagnosis and environmental monitoring. Moreover, the use of portable c-nose enables the on-site measurements and analysis of vapors without extra gas-sampling units. In this study, a PDA-based portable e-nose was developed using micro-machined gas sensor array and miniaturized electronic interfaces. The computing power and flexible interface of the PDA are expected to provide the rapid and application specific development of the diagnostic devices, and easy connection to other information appliances. For performance verification of the developed portable e-nose system, Six different vapors were measured using the system. The results showed the reproducibility of the measured data and the distinguishable patterns between the vapor species. The application of two different artificial neural networks verified the possibility of the automatic vapor recognition based on the portable measurements.