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Electronic nose for indoor mold detection and identification

206 points by PaulHoule

by alfonsodev

12 subcomments

At the risk of sounding stupid, I’ve noticed my mom’s house smell has changed a lot in the last year and is stronger in her room and bathroom, coincidentally or not, since she has started showing mild dementia symptoms and has been diagnosed with vascular dementia. She feels extremely tired despite standard blood test markers being OK.
The smell could have simple explanations, like she forgets to ventilate the room, or her hygiene is not as good as before, since she has become more avoidant of any discomfort, but we are helping her with the hygiene part at least, the ventilation is harder because she complains about cold, and refuses to leave the room. Also to me, it is a different smell from what would be poor ventilation and from what would be lack of hygiene, but I can’t point out what it is. I'm usually very good detecting when a room has not been ventilated, I just feel I breath worse and can't focus as well, I'm annoying to other people that doesn't want to open the window.
She spends most of the time in bed, her body is telling her to sleep much more than before, and she has become very stubborn about getting out of the house, going to the dentist, etc. Since she is very intelligent and still has the verbal ability to make you believe she will do it as soon as she feels better and that will be soon, the reality is that months are passing by and that is not happening.
I wonder if anyone could recommend an affordable but effective air quality device, mold testing kits (if such a thing exists), or what targeted blood tests can be done. Also, if there are tests to fine grain the diagnosis of vascular dementia, to know if there is accumulation of proteins in the brain, or what is the origin of the issue.
She is 79 years old, perhaps there is nothing to do, but somehow I feel the environment of the house has something toxic in it, I even thought about electromagnetic fields, but I really don’t know where to start.
Edit: We live in Spain, her doctor feedback is that her blood tests are great for her age, and we didn't have much info about the vascular dementia situation somehow has been implied that is normal in her age.

by sschueller

6 subcomments

I find it interesting that we seem to have mastered what the human eye can do and even go beyond it with like infrared but somehow we still can't build a chip that can "taste" or "smell".

by tippa123

1 subcomments

This would be very interesting for industrial applications that rely on clean rooms. What comes to mind is environmental monitoring for microbes, which is tedious but important and currently has significant lag time (≈2 weeks).
What I couldn’t determine is whether there is any information about concentration. I mean so what if something is present, you have a lot of ubiquitous organisms out there.
Nevertheless, if the technology matures, it could help identify a problem earlier before it becomes visually obvious. You would still need to determine the root cause. Or it could help with a better decision making before buying a house?
All in all a lot to think about.

by ram_rattle

1 subcomments

This e-nose in general interesting, do anyone know any sensors that are currently commercially available to prototype these things?

by crispyambulance

0 subcomment

I’ve used hardware store “mold kits” where you tack some tape onto a surface and then send it to a service that will analyze it for you. My understanding is that these services simply look at the tape through a microscope, or apply it to a growth media that’s been prepped to “prefer” the specific types of fungus they’re looking for.
One would think there are PCR-based services that do this? That would be the gold standard for this stuff, and it could easily scale enough to become economical, but to my knowledge there are no commercial mold testers that do this.

by andsoitis

4 subcomments

Usually you have to spend thousands of dollars for an expert with the right equipment to focus on select areas of your home (areas that are suspect).
Are there ways to do a full-house scan yourself?

by voxleone

1 subcomments

The inevitable AI angle: researchers are increasingly exploring perception, self-modeling, and grounded interaction as the foundation for the next wave of AI systems, ones that behave in ways more aligned with human-like awareness than LLMs alone can provide (see work like MUSE or situational awareness in vision-language reasoning).
Systems like the electronic nose described here highlight what many think is missing in current AI approaches: continuous physical sensing combined with explicit novelty detection and decision boundaries that let a system say “this is real”, “this is happening now”, or “this is outside what I know”. Human-like behavior is unlikely to emerge from language models in isolation; it appears to come from closed perception-reasoning loops that are causally coupled to the environment. Without sensory grounding, AI tends to optimize for plausibility rather than correctness, and scaling or prompting alone doesn’t seem to address that gap.

by westurner

1 subcomments

Looks like adding Graphene to SnO2 (Tin Oxide) sensors increases sensitivity and battery life and reduces operating temperature to room temperature, for an increase in manufacturing complexity and cost.

by alansaber

0 subcomment

I was surprised to see surface acoustic wave sensing for bio mentioned, since my lecturer researched it in the 80s. I guess mechanical sensing is hard to innovate.

by xtiansimon

0 subcomment

And electronic mouth to taste water.
Residents in Bethpage, NY are dealing with Grumman water contamination or “plume”.
https://youtu.be/vgezHCoqiUo?si=1wn7Grt8vpAnzJ_Z
I live on Long Island and drink well water. I’d sure like a home monitor.

by bflesch

0 subcomment

This is significant, especially if it can be productized. Thanks for working on such an important topic. One day in the future technologies like this will keep vulnerable, sick people from being gaslit by other humans about the cause of their disease.

by HocusLocus

4 subcomments

Or just project negative ions into your working and sleeping places and breathe easy, wipe the mold spores off the walls every couple months or so. Test their effectiveness by shining a bright flashlight in the dark. You can't see the beam!