PVA-coated miniaturized flexible fiber optic sensor for acetone detection: a prospective study for non-invasive diabetes diagnosis

Diabetes is a complex metabolic disorder that leads to various health complications. Present conventional diagnostic methods of puncturing a finger cause pain, discomfort and measurement procedures often lead to irregular testing. Therefore, there is a need for a simple, painless, and portable technique, which can diagnose diabetes non-invasively and in real-time. Acetone vapor in human exhaled breath is a natural biomarker correlated with some metabolic diseases, like diabetes. Thus in this work, Fabry–Perot Interferometer-based polyvinyl alcohol-coated sensor platform for acetone vapor detection non-invasively at room temperature has been proposed and investigated for the prospective study of diabetic detection. The developed sensor platform of approx. 61 μm cavity length was employed for acetone sensing from 0 to 80 µL/L concentration. The evaluation parameters of the developed sensor like sensitivity, the limit of detection, response and recovery time for the acetone vapor detection at room temperature were observed in the order of 43.9 pm/(µL/L), 0.45 µL/L, 60 s and 10 s, respectively. The cross-sensitivity of the sensor was checked with methanol and ethanol. The experimentally observed sensitivity response (swelling) was found in agreement with the theoretically calculated miscibility values obtained from the Hansen solubility parameter model. The thermal stability of the developed sensor was also studied and found linear between the temperature ranges of 25–75 °C. The proposed sensor is simple, miniaturized, flexible, cost-effective, and highly sensitive for low acetone vapor concentration detection at room temperature. Therefore, this sensor maybe explore for diagnosis of diabetes non-invasively via acetone detection from the exhaled breath.