GE Global Research has just won a $2 million award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to develop wearable RFID sensors to alert people to the presence of environmental chemical agents in the air.

The sensor could also be used to analyze a person’s breath. Simply breathing on the sensor could potentially pick up biomarkers that serve as an early signal to the presence of certain diseases such as diabetes or cancer and metabolic disorders.

The sensor system will employ a novel sensing approach that uses resonant antenna structures of RFID sensors coated with various sensing films that will recognize specific volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and chemical agents with part-per-billion detection limits.

The sensors can be made at a size smaller than a penny for easy application to a typical identification badge and do not require a battery for operation.