The 2020 James Dyson Award-winning project helps calculate blood sugar using just your breath

Gone are the days of having to physically prick your skin to see how much sugar there was in your blood. It’s a long, painful ritual for just a mere glimpse at the glucose level — a three-digit number. The Aerolyze replaces this invasive procedure with a system that requires simply breathing into a palm-sized inhaler.

The Aerolyze is quite literally a breath of fresh air… It offers a new, more accessible, and less apprehensive way to measure blood sugar for prediabetics in the form of an inhaler that performs breath acetone analysis to determine your blood glucose levels. Acetone is a compound released when the body burns fat, and gives prediabetics a distinct breath smell. Simply put, more acetone in your breath means your body is burning more fat… lower levels of acetone translates to higher blood glucose.

Thipok Cholsaipant came up with the idea for the Aerolyzer after seeing his father suffer from a variety of diabetes-related ailments. He soon began working out a more effective way of observing these blood glucose levels without going through the physical pain of pricking your finger everytime. Cholsaipant’s solution uses a different input – breath. “Breath analysis shows the most significant potential because it can be taken on the fly, produces no waste, and near-instant results. Plus, deep breathing is an excellent affordance for a positive experience”, says Cholsaipant. The device comes in a small, pocket-friendly avatar, with a strap that makes it easy to carry around your wrist. Just breathe into it, and an LED tells you if your sugar levels are high, optimum, or low. Rather than inundating you with accurate readings that may fluctuate based on time, the Aerolyzer presents data to you in a way that’s less scary and more actionable. Moreover, it pairs with a smartphone or smartwatch app to let you know what to do if your blood sugar levels are too low or high. Measuring your sugar levels has quite literally never been easier!

The Aerolyze is a winner of the James Dyson Award for the year 2020.

Designer: Thipok “Poom” Cholsaipant