Syft Super Nose
Background
The Voice100 in the lab
(click to enlarge)
Until recently, the technology underlying the device – Selected Ion Flow Tube-Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS) – was used by scientists to investigate the origins of the universe by studying the chemical reactions in interstellar gas clouds. But as these sciences moved on, priorities shifted and SIFT-MA technology became a curiosity, used mainly by researchers studying the mechanisms driving chemical reactions.
But in the mid 1990s, work begun in the preceding decade led to a kind of inversion of application of the SIFT-MS technology. Instead of concentrating on using known quantities of chemical ingredients to define the parameters of a chemical reaction, researchers found they could reverse the procedure and use databases of known parameters to calculate the quantities of product produced by a chemical reaction. In practical terms, this allowed diagnostic tests to be performed to detect and quantify trace quantities of gases in air samples.
