A prototype foot-sole acetone analyzer and its applicability to caloric balance monitoring

Although breath acetone has been expected to be a good indicator of fat metabolism, it is difficult to keep users motivated to measure due to its nature of extraordinary operation such as deep exhalation. Therefore, a simpler method that requires less user input is required. As a means of handling this problem, the authors focus on skin acetone and prototype a foot-sole acetone analyzer world first which can measure skin acetone by having the user simply step onto the prototype like a weight scale. The aims of this work were to investigate the accuracy of our prototype and to discuss the applicability of foot-sole acetone to caloric balance monitoring. Our results revealed that prototyped analyzer has high positive correlation with the conventional gas chromatography, and the accuracy is practical enough for determining the user's skin acetone emissions. Further, we found that plus or minus of the total caloric balance can be estimated from the amount of emitted foot-sole acetone by using the relationship between them with 79% accuracy. This result indicates that there is no need to record caloric intake and caloric consumption, and foot-sole acetone measurements by using our prototype could be useful for dieting management at home.