EBCare smart mask: breath monitoring for diagnosis and management of respiratory diseases

Inside it hides hi-tech sensors that make it smart and able to check up on you in real time. It is the latest frontier of wearable devices: after smart watches and patches that assess cardiac activity, inflammation levels and more, come masks that monitor breath to detect health alerts. The common goal: to help patients better manage their health directly within the walls of their homes.

A new study published in Science unveils the qualities of the smart mask, showing how these cutting-edge accessories can be used to assess a person's metabolic and respiratory condition. Were it not for a small white pocket on the front, it would look every bit like an ordinary Ffp2 mask, the kind that protected us from infection during the Covid pandemic. The prototype was developed by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and has been christened 'EBCare' (Ebc stands for exhaled air condensate) and looks like a hi-tech paper mask.

Among the diseases it can monitor by analysing breath are asthma, Bpco (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and post-Covid infections. Unlike other smart masks under development that monitor physical changes such as temperature, humidity or breathing rate, the authors point out, the one from medical engineering professor Wei Gao and colleagues can analyse chemicals in the breath in real time. For example, it could monitor asthma patients for levels of nitrite, a chemical that indicates airway inflammation.

"Checking a patient's breath is something that is routinely done. However, it requires the patient to go to the clinic for sample collection, and then a waiting period for lab results," says Gao, who is the lead researcher of the study. "Since the Covid-19 broke out, people are wearing masks more. We can exploit this increased usage for personalised remote monitoring to get real-time feedback on our health at home or in the office. For example, we could use this information to assess how well a medical treatment might work'.

Gao has already developed a range of wearable biosensors that analyse human sweat to measure levels of metabolites, nutrients, hormones and proteins. In this case, the target was breath, which brought with it a new set of challenges. To selectively analyse the chemicals or molecules present in someone's exhale, it must first be cooled and condensed into a liquid. In the clinical setting, this cooling step is performed separately from the analysis. Samples are cooled in ice buckets or bulky coolers. The new mask is self-cooling.