This smart mask monitors your lung health

Sep 18, 2024

If this summer’s COVID-19 surge has had you donning your face masks more frequently, you’re not alone.

But if you have a lung condition, there’s a new kind of mask you may consider wearing.

What’s a smart mask?: A new face-mask-based smart device analyzes breath biomarkers to monitor lung health.

Developed by a research team from Caltech, it is designed for continuous, at-home monitoring.
Patients with conditions like asthma and COPD can wear the mask at home to measure their biomarker levels and go to the doctor if the mask suggests a flare-up is likely.
This approach can both improve intervention and prevent unnecessary care. The mask can catch life-threatening flare-ups early and keep patients from wasting time going to get their inflammation levels checked at the clinic when they’re doing well.

Illustration by Mary Delaney

Wait, what’s a breath biomarker?: There’s more in each of your exhales than carbon dioxide and the remnants of your last meal. Each of these puffs of air can reveal a lot about your health—if you know what to look for.

A key lung health biomarker is nitrite. When the airways are inflamed, you exhale higher levels of this gas.
However, biomarkers like nitrite are easier to detect and analyze in the liquid rather than the gas state. In a liquid, the compound is more concentrated.
But how do you turn breath into a liquid? That’s where the smart mask’s cooling system comes in, turning the wearer’s exhale into a liquid form called exhaled breath condensate (EBC).

Interestingly, another potential application of the smart mask’s biomarker analysis is breathalyzer alcohol detection. In their study, the researchers found the mask to be more accurate at detecting alcohol content than a standard breathalyzer test, which depends on a blowing action that can launch alcohol-laden spit into the device.

Our thoughts on smart masks: We’re excited about this face mask innovation, especially as a chronic illness management tool. However, we’re curious about whether the current political atmosphere around face masks may help or hinder the product’s uptake once it is available.

On the one hand, in 2024, more people than ever before are familiar with face masks. People who’d only ever seen these masks on their medical providers can now distinguish between surgical masks, KN94s, and N95s.
These masks continue to be effective against respiratory virus transmission. And they may make more eligible people comfortable using the smart mask to monitor their lung health.
On the other hand, might the politicization of face masks hinder acceptance of this product?
Messaging around COVID-19 is more polarized than over. Especially in the U.S., the wearing of face masks has become a partisan issue. Some places, such as New York’s Nassau County, have even moved to ban public wearing of face masks, with some medical exceptions.

Whether they’re helping a wearer avoid catching or spreading a virus or monitoring their lung health through creative technological upgrades, we think face masks deserve to be normalized again. Political polarization around this issue ultimately hurts the most vulnerable patients, which we can’t accept.