Researchers at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have conducted a study investigating a new prototype breathalyzer test that detects a Covid infection through changes in your chemical “breath print”.

To use the breathalyzer, the user breathes into a single-use tube for 10 seconds, and then it’s loaded into a small printer-size spectrometer that reads the results. According to the study, the breathalyzer test gives results in five minutes with an accuracy comparable to PCR tests, the results of which can take days.

“Human breath contains a lot of metabolites that can be used for disease detection,” says the author of the study Xing Yi Ling, a biological chemistry professor at NTU.

Though this isn’t the first Covid breathalyzer that scientists have developed, this system is small and portable, so can easily be used to provide accurate test results for entry at crowded events like sports games, conference centers, or concerts. It can also quickly find people who have Covid but may not have any symptoms.

Ling’s team of researchers tested the technology at a hospital and at the airport in Singapore by giving travelers a PCR test along with a breathalyzer test. The breathalyzer yielded a false negative rate of 3.8 percent and a false positive rate of 0.1 percent. “Based on the 501 people that we tested, or sensitivity and accuracy are comparable to RT-PCR,” Ling explains. “That’s a small-scale study, and of course, more validation needs to be done in near future and is currently ongoing.”

One further study confirms the accuracy of this convenient and portable test, it could be relied upon to keep large social events as safe as possible while circumventing the uncomfortable swab-up-the-nose test that we are all tired of.

Source study: ACS Nano – Noninvasive and point-of-care surface-enhanced raman scattering (SERS)-based breathalyzer for mass screening of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) under 5 min