Evaluation of a Possibility of the Application of “Electronic Nose” to Monitoring Deviations in the Functional Obesity of Children in Hospital Conditions: Observations of Changes during Treatment

This work is a continuation of a study on the use of chemical gas sensors and a portable “electronic nose” for diagnosing obesity and related pathologies in children in a hospital. Using a portable Bio-8 device, 330 volatile skin compound profiles were measured in the forearm region on an empty stomach in various states of children with various diseases during inpatient examinations and treatment in the endocrinology department. Monitoring changes in the profile of volatile skin compounds during the period of hospital stay in obese children made it possible to identify priority metabolic disorders in multiple pathological disorders and diagnoses by a characteristic set of chemical biomerkers of processes, reliably detected in skin secretions on the right forearm. Multiparametric data of the “electronic nose” were processed by principal component analysis to assess ranking of the results into the groups “Normal” and “Obesity with a risk of the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM)”. Based on the highly informative parameters of the sensor array, changes in the chemical composition of the skin gas profile on the right forearm during the period of patients’ stay in the hospital and the effectiveness of standard approaches in each specific case were evaluated, and the personalization of treatment was thus increased. Simple calculated parameters and a method for assessing lipid and carbohydrate metabolism disorders based on the signals of eight sensors above the skin measured for 200 s without sampling were proposed. The sensitivity of the method for monitoring changes in the metabolome in a hospital is at least 80%. Specificity for lipid metabolism disorders is 100%; for type 1 diabetes, 100%; and for mixed pathologies varies from 70 to 85%.