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This is fantastic:
The major weakness of the ammonia blood test is that by the time the results are received by a treating physician, it is hour-old information that may not represent the true ammonia levels of a patient. The breath analyzer enables super-fast, repeatable testing so ammonia levels can be verified and treatment can begin immediately.
And:
Spearrin didn’t realize how hard this project was supposed to be until he called a respected expert on hyperammonemia for advice. Before Spearrin could ask his questions, the expert said, “You’ve chosen a horribly challenging project because ammonia is the most difficult molecule to measure and newborns are the most difficult patient population to work with.”
Spearrin replied, “But we’ve already built a working prototype and we’ve tested it on two patients.”
And:
In just a year, the team had gone from a rough idea on paper to a working prototype, patient-tested. This is warp speed in the medical device world.
It's a shame that this only works with volatiles. A blood glucose breathalyzer would be awesome, not to mention a $B/year market.
I think that detecting glucose in the air is impossible, but perhaps it can detect some byproduct that is produced during a glucose spike. I guess something like alcohol.
(For example, yeast produce a small amount of alcohol from glucose, because it doesn't use enough oxygen to transform it to carbon dioxide. At the low level, people is not so different of yeast. :) So this or a similar approach may work.)
IANAB/MD/...
Unfortunately signals like that would get swamped by the effects of oral and gastric flora. This is how Helicobacter pylori is detected, in fact.