Just attach to your skin⁈ The developed sensor detects alcohol in an ultra-sensitive manner.
In collaboration with Dr. Masato Tominaga, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Saga University, and Dr. Osamu Shirai, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University (co-author: Citra Dewi Rakhmania, Graduate School of Science and Engineering PhD student, 1st year), an ultra-sensitive alcohol gas that can be applied to the skin has been developed sensor. The skin emits very small amounts of various organic gases. Specific skin gas detection sensors are required to react only with specific gases and to be ultra-sensitive. In this joint study, an enzyme that reacts specifically with alcohol was used and an efficient detection device was developed that converts the enzyme reaction directly into an electrical signal. When the device was actually attached to the wrist and the alcohol (22.3 ml of 15% sake, about one glass) was drunk, the alcohol gas emitted from the wrist was successfully detected and quantified.
In the future, further work will be done to improve the stability of the device’s high-sensitivity detection, with a view to also working on sensitive detection of other disease-related organic gases.