Intelligent smelling shirt based on fabric sensors for health status monitoring

In this work, we have implemented a wearable device for detecting the body odor of wearer. The sensing unit of this device consists of four fabric based gas sensors based on nanocomposite between polymers and carboxylic-functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT-COOH) simply fabricated by embroidering on textile. The communication between smelling shirt and computer is based on a serial communication using ZigBee wireless network. We have tested the performance of these sensors with eight types of volatile organic gases. Based on principal component analysis (PCA), it was found that this device is able to track change in the human body odor, thereby showing a potential for application in real-time health status monitoring.