A Compact Affordable Electronic Nose Device to Monitor Air Toxic Compounds: A Filter Diagonalization Method Approach

This paper introduces a compact, affordable electronic nose (e-nose) device which aim is to detect volatile compounds that could affect human health, such as carbon monoxide, combustible gas, hydrogen, methane, and smoke, among others. Such artificial olfaction device consists of an array of six metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors and a computer-based system for data acquisition, processing, and visualization. This study further proposes the use of the Filter Diagonalization Method (FDM) to extract the spectral contents of the signals obtained from the sensors. Preliminary results show that the prototype is functional and that the FDM approach is suitable for a later classification stage. Example deployment scenarios of the proposed enose include indoor facilities (buildings and warehouses), compromised air quality places (mines and sanitary landfills), public transportation, mobile robots, and wireless sensor networks.