Multi-TIC Colormetric Badge

"Wearable, passive detectors for toxic industrial chemicals (TICs) and chemical warfare agents (CWAs) will greatly improve the safety of military personnel operating in chemically-threatened environments. Cyrano Sciences, Inc. (CSI) uses polymer-compositesensor technology to construct sensor arrays, that are uniquely positioned to address applications, such as detector badges for TICs and CWAs, that require compact, light-weight, wearable, rugged, stable, low-cost, low-power, analyte-general detectors. CSImanufactures the Cyranose 320 (C320), a COTS handheld vapor identification system that consists of: a polymer-composite sensor array that returns a signature pattern for a given vapor; a pneumatic system; and pattern recognition algorithms to identify thevapor based on the array pattern. The C320 has been successfully tested as a detector for a small number of TICs and CWAs. In addition, CSI has developed wireless badge-type detectors without pneumatic systems for proprietary consumer applications thathave stringent requirements for size, cost, power requirements and ruggedness. The proposed Phase I work will determine the feasibility that a badge detector using a polymer-composite sensor array can meet requirements for detection limit and accuracy ofappropriate CWAs and TICs, and will also develop design requirements and a preliminary design for such a badge detector. This type of personnel monitor has readily extensible applic