(606b) Smartphone Integrable High Density Nano Gas Sensor Array for Pollutant Detection

Conventional methods for detection of pollutants are often expensive and time consuming. Data collections for air pollutants are generally confined to air monitoring stations, which are then assumed to be representative of the study region. Laboratory costs for these tests exceed $100/sample and only provide a single snapshot in time. This lack of data-capturing mobility and availability of real-time information hinders the commercialization process and severely limits the applications of this class of gas sensors. To characterize the risks from pollution, there is a great need to develop portable, low-power, and low-cost gas sensors which are able to detect temporal and spatial quantities of multiple pollutants simultaneously at sub ppm-level concentrations over long periods of time. A great advantage of the smartphone-based sensor system we are developing is that it will greatly reduce the overall cost of the system by utilizing smartphones to provide the user interface functionality and computing power for the system. During last few years, UCR has been working on the developing of high density nano gas sensor array using hybrid nanostructures (i.e., single walled carbon nanotubes functionalized with various metals, metal oxides, and conducting polymers) as sensing materials in chemiresistors and chemical field effect transistor (ChemFET).  By nanoengineering the sensing materials, we demonstrated a highly sensitivity with fast response and recovery time. In addition, the array is integrated into a housing unit for the final device and linked with a smartphone using Bluetooth wireless technology. The smartphone is running the open source Android platform, allowing for ease of programming to control the device and create a user interface. The smartphone interface  is also programmed to collect geospatial data and temperature readings during sensing data collection, to assist in drawing trends from the data and building models. In addition, the ability to load the program onto any Android-based smartphone is free the final control unit from being tethered to a computer, allowing for instantaneous measurements anywhere in the field.  During the presentation, the latest development of smartphone integrated high density nano gas sensor array will be presented.