The Technology
While chemical compounds are essential to many aspects of our lives and provide key solutions, they may also create environmental and health challenges. Chemical mixture might have an increased effect on health and environment. Main inspection method is spectrometry and is mostly concentrated in identification of pre-targeted chemicals, however, in many cases there is a need to identify the chemical mixture without knowing in advance what it is made of. This is relevant both for environmental inspection such as monitoring of air quality or contamination detection after use of chemical weapons and for identification of health biomarkers. Even though some methods allow identification of non-targeted materials none of them allows doing so in space and time domains. Current smart dust devices allow indetification of physical parameters such as temperature and pressure and limited chemical identification of pH and pre-defined substances such as oxygen, hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Scaling down known devices is impractical and would be too expensive, complex to manufacture, would create a pollution problem, and when scaling down to nanometric scale might be a health hazard when swallowed or inhaled. Programmable, battery-less and biodegradable spectrometry-in-a-particle can be used to analyze and map in-situ the widest spectrum of both targeted and non-targeted chemical compounds as a function of spatial coordination and time. The particles are made of biodegradable materials and printed electronics. The particles can communicate with one-another and transmit the acquired spectra to a main analyzing system. The particles can be dispersed in air, on the skin (using a carrier matrix or spray), in human digestive tract and in confined space. They can monitor environmental materials and pollution, agriculture parameters, bio-markers, materials in reactors etc.
Advantages
- Mapping chemicals in space and time
- Low cost
- Biodegradable
- Identification of unlimited pre-defined and none-targeted chemical substances
Applications and Opportunities
- Environmental protection and hazardous materials inspection in confined spaces
- Inspection of weather condition
- Inspection of biomarkers
- Agriculture
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