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Perspective: Crowd-based breath analysis: assessing behavior, activity, exposures, and emotional response of people in groups
Citation:
Williams, J. AND J. Pleil. Perspective: Crowd-based breath analysis: assessing behavior, activity, exposures, and emotional response of people in groups. Journal of Breath Research. Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, Uk, 10(3):032001, (2016).
Impact/Purpose:
Certainly, direct sampling of exhaled breath from individuals (one at a time) has been the standard method regardless of the ultimate diagnostic goal (Phillips 1997, Risby and Solga 2006, Pleil 2008, Pleil et al 2011). Recently, the breath community has invoked research at the in vitro cellular and ex vivo tissue level to isolate sources of volatile compounds from bacteria, human cell lines, and diseased tissues. Cellular respiration, or “cell breath” has valuable implications for high-throughput toxicity testing as well as for bacterial fingerprinting (Angrish et al. 2015, Baranska et al. 2015, Zhu et al. 2013, Shestivska et al. 2015). This newest approach described herein as “crowd breath” analysis completes the continuum beyond cellular respiration and individual subject analyses, see schematic Figure 1. We expect that this new tactic will open a whole new arena of research with significance for marketing (focus group) analysis, forensic and security applications, community health assessments, environmental exposure detection, and behavioral/activity monitoring (Kidd and Parshall 2000, Pleil et al. 2016, Hunter 2005, Klepeis et al. 2001).
Description:
A new concept for exhaled breath analysis has emerged wherein groups, or even crowds of people are simultaneously sampled in enclosed environments to detect overall trends in their activities and recent exposures. The basic idea is to correlate the temporal profile of known breath markers such as carbon dioxide, isoprene, or acetone with all other volatile organics in the air space. Those that trend similarly in time are designated as breath constituents. The ultimate goal of this work is to develop technology for assessing group based behaviors, chemical exposures or even changes in stress or mood. Applications are myriad ranging from chemical dose/toxicity screening to health and stress status for national security diagnostics. The basic technology employs real-time mass spectrometry capable of simultaneously measuring volatile chemicals and endogenous breath markers.
