COVID-19 Breathalyzer is in development, based on dog’s sense of smell

(WHTM) — Work is underway to create a breathalyzer that would detect COVID-19 in patients.

Engineers at Indiana and Purdue Universities are developing a sensor that would identify the scent of the virus in the breath.

“Diseases have specific smells that we just as a society have not been using because we haven’t been able to, because we didn’t have the technology,” says Dr. Amanda Siegel, assistant research professor at IUPUI. “But in the last 20 years, we’ve gotten the technology to quantify and understand what smells are associated with which diseases. And more recently our research group and others are coming up with the technology to be able to detect those same smells.”

In Europe the Austrian government in December shows off its COVID-smelling dog that was trained to scan 250 samples in 10 minutes.