Realisation of Low-Cost Ammonia Breathalyzer for the Identification of Tooth Decay by Neural Simulation

摘要

The human mouth contains many kinds of substances both in liquid and gaseous form. The individual concentrations of each of these substances could provide useful insight to the health condition of the entire body. Ammonia is one of such substances whose concentration in the mouth has revealed the presence or absence of diseases in the body. One of such is tooth decay (caries) which occurs when there is insufficient concentration of ammonia in the mouth. This paper proposes an affordable ammonia breathalyzer designed using metal oxide sensor for the detection and prediction of tooth caries in humans with a 87% overall success rate. Selection of appropriate sensor was done via simulation using feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN). The breathalyzer has been designed and constructed to be low-cost such that it can be used for early detection and prevention of tooth decay.